Black History Month Quiz

Black History Month wraps up today with a quiz and a prize.

Black History Month ends today, and, in honor of the month’s conclusions and the spirit of greater knowledge, I am making today’s post a quiz.

A prize is available to the reader who gets the most correct answers!

Feel free to submit the answers as comments.

Good luck, and thanks for a fantastic month! 

1. Who founded Black History Month?
2. Who was the first African American to receive a PhD. from Harvard University?
3. Name two major events in black history that occurred on August 28.
4. Who was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature?
5. Who was Chicago’s first black mayor?  Whom did he defeat in the general election?  What was the voter turnout percentage in the general election?
6. Which recently deceased Chicago author was a member of the black and gay lesbian writer Halls of Fame?
7. How many NBA championships have the Chicago Bulls won?  Name two black players who were on all of the championship teams.
8. Which famous black abolitionist was born Isabella Baumfree? What is her most famous phrase?
9. Who was born 200 years ago yesterday?  Why is his birthday significant in terms of black history?
10. Name three black editors and publishers of The Chicago Reporter.
11. Who was the first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice? What is his most famous case? How many times did he argue in front of the Supreme Court?  How many times did he win?
12. Which Chicago female poet became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950? 
13. Name five African Americans who have won Academy Awards for either best actor or best actress.
14. What is the one-drop rule and why is it significant for black people in American history?
15. True or false: The first black people to come to America were slaves.
16. Name two of the three places in the U.S. Constitution where slavery is included but not mentioned by name. Extra credit: Name all three places.
17. Which three post-Civil War Amendments all dealt with African Americans?  What did they say?
18. Who was able to vote first in U.S. elections: black women or Native Americans?
19. Which black female talk show host became the first black woman billionaire?  What year did that first happen?
20. What was the inspiration for Jay-Z’s name?  Who is his wife?

Black History Month: Flavian Prince Tries to Interrupt The Pipeline.

The late Beauty Turner figures prominently in a powerful new documentary.

I wrote yesterday about Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.

Today, I am posting about a film that also deals with education: Interrupt The Pipeline.

The film’s genesis occurred a couple of years ago, when Flavian Prince was working as an administrator at an alternative school in Champaign, Illinois.

Within a short period of time, he made four important and related realizations:

a. He was receiving many students from jail, including youth as young as 12 years old.

b. The vast majority of those students were black.

c. Many of them were former public housing residents who had relocated with their families from Chicago in search of a better life after their homes had been demolished as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan For Transformation.

d.Part of the pattern was driven by a strong mismatch between the inner-city students and their interactions with their new teachers and administrators, who were woefully unprepared to teach them.

Last year, Prince moved to Chicago and started teaching at John Harvard Elementary School in the city’s Englewood neighborhood, where, again, his students were almost all black.

Harvard was a turnaround school.  This means that, while the students stayed the same, an almost entirely new crew of teachers and administrators were hired to help boost the students’ previously poor performance.

But Prince quickly understood that his students at Harvard were experiencing the same confluence of  race, poverty, and physical and psychological dislocation through the city’s housing policies.

He also saw quickly that many of his students were headed to the same destination as the youth in Champaign.

Pushed and motivated by his students and their fates, Prince decided to do something about it.

Interrupt The Pipeline, a film that was a collaboration between Prince and his students, is the result.

Full disclosure: I worked with Prince on the film and The Chicago Reporter, the publication where I work, undergirds an accompanying chapter guide. I am also a board member of the mentoring program he has created.

Interrupt the Pipeline starts in Chicago and ends in Champaign, but Prince and his students show indelibly how the two are linked.   

Prince’s students drive much of the action-they did a lot of the filming, appear throughout the film, and did all of the music-but a wide array of adults, including parents, business owners, community activists like the late Beauty Turner, and teachers also appear in the film. 

The film has many poignant moments that illustrate the students’ innocence and youthful vitality being strained and shaken by the confluence of factors with which they must contend.

One particularly painful story involves Daniel, whose mother has moved him, despite her instincts, from school to school for fear of his safety.  This included sending him to her former elementary school-a move she had hoped never to make.

In one scene, filmed in a car, Daniel recounts to Prince a litany of violence and death he has witnessed during the past five years .

Daniel calls his father to see  if he has the forms Daniel needs to register for high school.  “Hello, HELLO?” he yells repeatedly into the phone, trying in vain to make himself heard. Telling his father that he is right outside the house does not elicit an invitation.  The father does not have the forms.  And Daniel says afterward that he is giving up hope. 

In another scene, Corey, who wants to be a massage therapist, stands in darkness outside the door to his home after having told about being shot at the week before.  A siren blares in the background.   Anxiety grows as the shot, which is taken from the ground and shows the boy at the top of a flight of stars, head slightly bowed, stays on the screen for 10, then 15 seconds. 

Corey’s admission into his house is just a temporary relief, though, as the viewer knows he must return to the same dangerous streets the next day.

In a different way, the Champaign section of the film illustrates the utter mismatch between student background and needs and what the system is providing. Student after student from Prince’s former alternative school tell heart-rending tales of violence they experienced by adults at school and of being arrested for jaywalking-he shows many students at the nearby University of Illinois campus crossing the street with impunity.

The result: the students are placed on an academic track that heads to prison, rather than to graduation, let alone a  college education.  One of the film’s most jaw dropping interviews comes with the man who provides the single hour of academic instruction per week for suspended students.

Interrupt the Pipeline is far more than a collection of individual stories designed to elicit pity from the viewer toward the helpless victims.  Far from it.

Beyond the agency the students demonstrate in making the film, in interrogating a first-year teacher at Robeson High School about what it has to offer them, the film includes healthy doses of analysis, some of which is provided by Chicago Reporter Editor and Publisher Alden Loury and former colleague Fernando Diaz.  The fiery Turner is her inimitable and inspiring self-her embrace and encouragement of Sharhonda, one of Prince’s students, toward the end of the film is profoundly moving. 

And Prince himself plans to make the film part of a larger effort to engage and empower youth.  He has created Project MAROONS, a mentoring program that will combine mentorship, internships and a curriculum in which The Chicago Reporter may appear prominently.  Part of Prince’s vision is to have the students eventually become mentors themselves for younger children. 

A first effort by Prince and his friend and fellow filmmaker Daniel Rudin, Interrupt The Pipeline has some rough patches with sound and transitions between scenes.  The film’s focus takes a while to emerge, crystallizing in the Champaign section.  Still, these minor challenges, which respectively illustrate Interrupt The Pipeline’s grassroots foundation and reflect a storytelling approach, in no meaningful way detract from the film’s power, moral outrage and call to action.

Black History Month: Obama on Education and Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.

Jonathan Kozol shows the immoral inequities in school funding in this poignant book.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, President Barack Obama cited the “urgent need to expand the promise of education in America,”

 ”In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a pre-requisite,”  he said.

Unfortunately,  America is eons away from realizing its promise to the country’s children-especially to black youth.

Former Rhodes Scholar Jonathan Kozol has been writing about educational inequality for more than 40 years.  His first book, the National Book Award-winning Death At An Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, depicted his experiences teaching in a predominantly black section of Boston.  Kozol eventually was fired for teaching the Langston Hughes poem A Dream Deferred, but not before he had gathered sufficient material to write a stinging indictment of what he saw.

Most recently, he has written The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid, which shows the increasing segregation of America’s schools, the ascendence of neo-conserative ideology and the abandonment of any real commitment to meet the promise of an equal education.

Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools came in between these two works.  Published in 1991, the book takes a devastating tour through the country, showing repeatedly, as the title suggests, the glaring inequalities between children’s education depending solely on where they lived and the concomitant betrayal of the promise to which Obama referred Tuesday night.

The book opens in East St. Louis, Illinois.  One of the best features of Kozol’s work is his ability to create vivid, if depressing portraits of the conditions in which children must learn as well as of the intersection of race, health, education and inequality.  In East St. Louis, for instance, he cites the city hazardous environmental conditions that impact students’ learning. 

The vast majority of the students in the city’s schools are black.

Of course, the bottom is just one part of the equation.  In Savage Inequalities Kozol also shows the contrasting facilities and conditions in which largely white, more affluent children learn.  Thus, his chapter on Chicago talks about city schools like Du Sable High School and suburban schools like New Trier High School, which was recently the target of Sen. James Meeks’ opening day boycott to highlight the enduring inequity.

Kozol’s tour through the country’s schools includes stops in Camden, New Jersey, New York City, San Antonio, Boston and Washington, DC.  The themes, portraits of children’s betrayal by the educational system, and deep-rooted inequities are depressingly similar.   Kozol does note that several of the cities have magnet schools, but also talks about how few children those schools reach compared to the whole school age population.

In addition to the vignettes, Kozol talks at some length about local property tax, which, especially at that time was the major vehicle to fund schools in the majority of states throughout the country.  He illustrates both that wealthier districts generate more money than poorer ones, with the result that poorer and blacker districts whose children have greater needs receive far less money per pupil than their wealthier and often whiter counterparts.  He includes an appendix that shows the existing and widening gap in per pupil school funding. 

Kozol also shows that wealthier districts actually generally have lower property tax rates than their poorer counterparts, with the result that it is essentially impossible for those districts to reach funding equity.

Kozol ends the book with a plea for America to stop the inequality:

 ’Surely there is enough for everyone within this country.  It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared.  All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America.”

Savage Inequalities, and Kozol’s educational writing more generally, have been a major contribution to advancing public dialogue, if not action, on this issue.  His willingness to take a repeated and unflinching look at America’s educational inequities are laudable, while his writing skills are admirable. 

At the same time, Savage Inequalities actually understates the system’s brutal inequities through an insufficiently rigorous look at the property tax.

First, Kozol only does a comparison of school funding on a single-year and individual basis.  The gaps that he finds grow exponentially when one looks at them over time and for the life of a district.  In Illinois, for example, we at The Chicago Reporter found a nearly $160,000 difference between the amount of money spent on a student in Lake Forest’s Rondout district during her K-12 years compared with the amount spent on a child in a downstate district. 

Multiplied by a classroom of 20 children, the gap grows to $3.2 million.

For a district of 2000 children, the difference increases to $320 million.

In addition, Kozol did not truly explain the cyclical nature of overreliance on the property as a mechanism for funding schools.  While he did note that there are spending gaps between districts and that wealthier districts tend to have lower property tax rates, he did not explore the consequences for business in the communities.

We did.

The results showed an even greater gap between the amount of per pupil property value in commerical property than in residential property between districts with low property tax and high property tax levels.  This showed that businesses, unsurprisingly, are more likely to choose a wealthy district with lower property taxes to set up shop in compared with a poorer district with higher property tax levels.

It means, in essence, that poor districts can never come close to catching up to their richer counterparts.

Kozol also does not look at the levels of achievement of black children in richer districts.  This topic falls outside the focus of his work, but is an important topic to consider because it complicates the dualistic picture he has painted in the book.

Still, nearly 20 years after its publication, and with former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan now heading the Obama adminstration’s effort to meet America’s promise to its children, Savage Inequalities is worth a read.   Even if the economic analysis is slightly understated, the inequalities Kozol depicts are savage indeed. 

 

Black History Month: Obama’s Speech and Books About Chicago.

President Obama spoke to the nation last night. Here are some high-quality books about black Chicago, his political home.

 Last night, President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress for the first time.  Standing where presidents before him have stood for centuries, he assured the American people that, despite the current economic crisis, the nation will “emerge stronger than before.”

As has been well-chronicled, Obama’s political roots, his wife Michelle,and much of his cabinet are all from Chicago.  

Carl Sandburg’s City of Big Shoulders has been the backdrop for many fine books by and about black people.  Here are some of the best (My only caveat is that I will not write about books I have already posted on like Mary Pattillo’s Black on the Block, Studs Terkel’s Race, and James Ralph’s Northern Protest):

1. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton.  Funded by money from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, this massive tome by two acclaimed sociologists remains a landmark in the discipline and in its description of how Chicago’s black community formed and was maintained.   It may be hard to remember what a radical act choosing a black neighborhood, the historic Bronzeville district, as a legitmate subject of scholarly inquiry was at the time: Drake and Cayton built from this base to create a masterwork that still speaks to us today. 

2. There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, byAlex Kotlowitz.  I had the great fortune to take a class with Kotlowitz while studying journalism at Northwestern University; the experience gave me a renewed appreciation of the care he gives to each sentence in his work.  This story of two brothers and their mother at the Henry Horner Homes is chockfull of poignant detail.  Kotlowitz’s moral outrage at the conditions in which these and thousands of other families lived throughout the city are the backbone of this compelling work.

3. Native Son, by Richard Wright.  Set on Chicago’s South Side, this tale of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas’ lofty dreams, murder of a young white woman and involvement with Communist Party members committed to his defense is utterly gripping.  Wright’s indictment through Bigger and his initially dim, and ultimately doomed, life prospects is vividly rendered.

4. A Raisin In the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry.  Drawing its title from a Langston Hughes poem, this play tells the story of the Younger’s family’s efforts to leave their dingy apartment and depressing neighborhood and move to a home in a white community moves, inspires and shames at the same time.  Hansberry’s dialogue, the shifts in action and tone, moments of humor and Walter’s gradual emergence into manhood despite white opposition to the move all sweep the viewer away.

5.Making the Second Ghetto: Chicago, Race and Housing, 1940-1960, by Arnold Hirsch.  This book can provide a deeper appreciation of the Youngers’ context if read in conjunction with A Raisin In the Sun.  Hirsch shows how the city’s elite and residents worked together when the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kramer declared the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants unconstitutional.  Neighborhood responses varied from outright hostility and violence in neighborhoods like Englewood, to, in one of the most interesting chapters, Hyde Park and Kenwood’s establishment of a commission to “manage” integration so that black people would feel welcomed even as their numbers would remain somewhat limited. 

6. A Fire on the Prairie, by Gary Rivlin.  Former 43rd Ward Alderman Martin Oberman’s objections notwithstanding, this is the definitive account of Harold Washington’s groundbreaking mayoral victory in 1983-a victory that was spearheaded in part by Obama strategist David Axelrod.  A former writer for the Chicago Reader, Rivlin blends a keen eye for detail with his obvious political sympathies to create what some Australians call “a cracking yarn.”

7. The Man Who Beat Clout City, by Robert McClory.  Former priest and South Boulevard neighbor Bob McClory tells the story of Renault Robinson, a young black policeman who endures all kinds of abuse on his way to forming the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League.  I will devote an entire post to this book before month’s end, and wanted to mention it here as an engaging, informative and well-written read.

Black History Month: John Edgar Wideman on Fatherhood.

For Italian Renaissance writer Dante Alighieri, feeling himself alone in a dark wood midway through his life’s journey prompted a trip through hell, purgatory, and, ultimately, to paradise-travels that resulted in the Divine Comedy.

For John Edgar Wideman, the feeling was the same, but the journey was to Pittsburgh, South Carolina and Western Massachusetts.  His companion for part of his quest for understanding was not Beatrice, but his father, Edgar Wideman. 

Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society, a short, kaleidoscopic and life-affirming book, is the record and result of Wideman’s travels.

The author of Brothers and Keepers is 52 when the story begins, well into a highly successful writing career and living in Western Massachusetts with his wife and family. 

His hairline beginning to recede, his awareness of life’s finitude growing, Wideman realizes that he wants to connect more deeply with his father.    “Perhaps it’s inevitable,” he writes. “Age brings you to your father.”

It’s not an easy arrival.

Wideman writes about the profound ambivalence and distance he must traverse to forge a stronger relationship with the man responsible for his birth.  To begin, his father left the Wideman house in Homewood, Pennsylvania, the setting for much of Wideman’s writing, when the son was young.   The departure left a gap between father and son that has not been breached when the book begins.

Beyond the physical separation, though, lie more fundamental sources of emotional separation. 

Whereas Wideman’s mother’s core belief was in love, Edgar Wideman believed indisiputably that we are alone in life.  Whereas his mother signified connection, his father denoted limits and boundaries, and, at times, punishment.  Wideman recounts a time when he called his father a spoor at the dinner table-a name which elicited a stinging slap on his cheeks designed both to hurt and to humiliate.

Race compounds these barriers.  In both the introduction and the main text of Fatheralong, Wideman offers a strong indictment of the whole construct of race-a formulation which has particularly negative consequences for young black men and their father.  “Are you proof he’s less than a man because you’re not able to give him what men give to their sons at birth: full, unquestioned, unconditional citizenship.” Wideman asks during a fictional exchange between a black father and son.  “The paradigm of race works to create distance between sons and fathers.”

The gap between Wideman and his father is significant. Upon reflection, the younger Wideman realizes that for decades he has squeezed time with his father into time in Homewood largely spent with his mother, at  a bar for a drink or two, or on the way to the airport. 

Wideman works to reduce that space by initiating a trip with his father to his family’s roots in South Carolina, including a visit to the aptly named Promised Land. 

The trip is a fruitful one.

Motivated by a hunger for connection and self-knowledge  so that he may feel more free, Wideman learns more about the land that formed his father and ancestors while still grappling with race’s everpresent power and slavery’s brutal legacy. 

Bowie Lomax, an elderly white professor who provides Wideman with information about his family’s history elicits fury from the author, who must restrain himself from bashing the older’s man head into oblivion.  “Didn’t mastery of Abbeville’s history, the power and privilege to tell my father’s story, follow from the original sin of slavery that stole, then silenced, my father’s voice,” Wideman writes. 

These challenges notwithstanding, the trip to South Carolina gives Wideman some of the information for which he was looking.  His son’s wedding provides more.

Wideman’s father is unintentionally left behind twice during his grandson’s wedding to a woman from Sierra Leone-first on the way from Pittsburgh, then from the hotel in Western Massachusetts to the wedding.  The delays elicit anxiety in the younger Wideman, who is the master of ceremonies and must eventually move the event forward without his father’s participation.  

This precipitates an intense feeling of loss and mourning in the younger Wideman-he calls it a “sudden grief so strong it would have shut out the wonder of my son’s wedding if I hadn’t been able to call upon my father.” Fortunately, Wideman is able to summon within himself a part of his father and does appreciate the wedding’s beauty.  For his part, the elder Wideman arrives after the ceremony has concluded, looking dapper if slightly anxious, and ready to enjoy himself.  

The book’s final section is a collection of father stories, memories of being a father and a son and husband, that swirl around in Wideman’s head and find their way onto the page. 

Wideman remembers a moment where he thinks he is playing tenderly with his daughter Jamila, who he is carrying on his shoulders, when in fact the girl is terrified of the leaves that he is carrying her near-an insight that propels Wideman back to his childhood fear of feathers.  He recounts the terrible morning when his son Jacob as a teenager killed a fellow camper and the seven years that have followed. 

And he remembers his Wideman ancestors.

The barriers to connection between black men and their fathers exist still, Wideman writes, “like a shadow, like a wall between my grandfathers and myself, my father and me, between the two of us, father and son, son and father.

So we must speak these stories to one another.

                                                                                  Love. “

Love and stories against history’s destructive power.  His adoption of  his mother’s creed and the practice of story used by his African ancestors to meet the burden of race and slavery’s legacy.  Wideman’s journey ends with insight,  internal resolution and enduring struggle. 

Fatheralong has many of the strengths of Wideman’s other books: the grounding in place; the fearless honesty with which he interrogates himself and others; the musical riffs and rhythm; the meticulous attention to detail; the inclusion of other authors; the refusal to provide cheap comfort either about America’s history; and the representation through words of life and its episodic, contradictory and non-linear nature. 

A different and less emotionally powerful book from Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong nevertheless does move the reader along through Wideman’s recounting of his and his father’s story and journey.

Black History Month: The Academy Awards and Sounder

William Armstrong's classic coming of age tale Sounder received four Academy Award nominations in 1972.

The winners have all been announced, the parties have begun and (mostly) eneded, and some of the potential contenders for next year’s “golden bald men” have been previewed.

The 81st Academy Awards are over.

Most of the attention deservedly will go to Slumdog Millionaire, which netted eight awards, or winners like Best Actress Kate Winslet, who broke through and got to hoist the trophy on this, her sixth nomimation.

But, of course, in every category, for every winner there are four nominees who lose.

I am writing today a children’s book that inspired a film that was nominated for four Academy Awards in 1972, but did not win any.

The book is  William Armstrong’s Sounder. The film bears the same name.

Set in Depression-era Louisiana, Sounder tells the story of the Morgans, a poor sharecropping family who confront a crisis when the father is arrested for stealing a ham to feed his family after many unsuccessful hunting expeditions.  Sounder, the family’s beloved hunting dog, is shot and apparently killed when he chases after the men who are taking Mr. Morgan away.

The family dynamics shift in the father’s absence.  The oldest son must assuume more responsibility and goes on an ill-fated effort to see his father at a work camp.  The son does not succeed in his mission, but does sustain an injury when a guard throws a rock at him, hitting his fingers.  During the trip home, the boy meets a schoolteacher who helps nurse his wound and feed his hunger for education. 

Eventually, the father returns home, his body aged and his spirit battered by his time in the work camp.  So, too, does the injured Sounder, who surprisingly survived the blast.  The wounded owner and dog spend time together before their deaths. 

Armstrong tells the story beautifully.  Sounder is rich with sensory detail and restrained short sentences, as demonstrated in the initial description of Sounder:

What the boy saw in Sounder would have been totally missed by an outsider.  The dog was not much to look at-a mixture of Georgia redbone hound and bulldog.  His ears, nose and color were those of a redbone.  The great square jaws and head, his muscular neck and broad chest showed his bulldog blood.  When a possum or coon was shaken from a tree, like a flash Sounder would clamp and set his jaw-vise just behind the animal’s head.  Then he would spread his front paws, lock his shoulder joints, and let the bulging neck muscles fly from left to right.  And that was all.”

Armstrong’s understand writing and simple vocabulary capture both the dog’s power, but also his meaning to the family.  This establishing of an external and internal reality is typical of how he blends emotion and description.

He is similarly effective in using detail to develop character. 

The boy’s initial excitement and confusion at smelling the ham cooking-something that usually happens only at Christmas-illustrates the family’s deep-rooted poverty by showing just how big a treat it is.  The mother’s humming conveys her happiness, but also her worry and efforts to stave off loneliness and despair. 

The teacher’s nurturing the boy’s injured fingers shows the healing and expansion that can come from education.  Sounder ‘s injured face and the father’s limp tinges their reunion is tinged with sadness because the once strong owner and his dog are both physically diminished through the cruelty of  the sharecropping system that ensured white domination.

Armstrong also does well in placing the reader in rural Louisiana, capturing both the love the Morgans have for the land and the country, but also the inescapable cycle of sharecropping in which they are stuck. 

In the end, Sounder and the father die, but continue to live inside the boy, who has matured through his journey, his education and his unwillingness to give into the oppression he encounters.  Sounder won the prestigious Newberry Award in 1970.

The 1972 film is also well done.  Cecily Tyson, Paul Winfield and Kevin Hooks all give memorable performances as the mother, father and son, respectively, under Martin Ritt’s able direction.  Nominated  for four Oscars, the film came up empty, but readers of this slender book will not.

Black History Month: When Affirmative Action Was White

Ira Katnzelson shows the little-known history of affirmative action.

Below abortion but far ahead of apple pie in its level of controversy, affirmative action has had a curious place in American public conversation since its inception more than 40 years ago.

Proponents see affirmative polices as necessary to redress centuries of wrongdoing by the majority group, while opponents, who arguably have presented their case more effectively, say the very concept of affirmative action contradicts fundamental pledges of equality under the law. 

But supporters and detractors alike may be taking too narrow a view of the subject, if Columbia University professor Ira Katznelson is to believed.

He maintains that, rather than beginnning with President Lyndon Johnson’s famous speech at Howard University in 1965-Katnznelson includes the speech in an appendix-affirmative action actually started decades earlier.

There’s a twist, though.

Katznelson argues that the primary beneficiaries of the early version of these policies were not black people, who are often held up by opponents as unworthy recipients of jobs or college admission, but white people.

He makes his case in an intriguing book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.

Katznelson explains that the impetus for the book came from his coming across a document written by W.E.B. DuBois in 1935, the height of New Deal legislation. Yet, far from celebrating the advances black people were experiencing as a result, DuBois struck a critical note.

His curiosity piqued, Katznelson decided to dig further.

He eventually uncovered a fascinating and little-explored history-though, to be fair, he does pay homage to previous historians’ work in the book’s introduction-in which Southern Democrats played a pivotal role, with Republican and Northern Democratic acquiescence, in stopping the unprecedented government largesse from going to black people. 

Instead, the policies actually ended up exacerbating the already yawning inequities between white and black people in the country.

The book opens with Johnson giving his dramatic and enormously well-received speech at Howard before pivoting back several decades to the New Deal.  Katznelson stakes his claim on three major areas: the exclusion of large numbers of black workers from New Deal and Fair Deal benefits; the use of local control to thwart the benefits that were awarded; and an about face on pro-union legislation that gutted advances that had been made there.

The result: more than $100 billion in government spending was disporportionately directed to white, rather than black, people.

Katznelson talks at length about the range of Southern politicians, from the outright racists like Theodore Bilbo to the so-called moderates like Richard Russell to the “liberals” like Johnson.  He makes it clear that, whatever their seeming differences on race issues, they were united by their initial exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from New Deal legislation-this was a major omission since millions of black people worked in these occupations-and later by their support of anti-union legislation that thwarted AFL and CIO initially successful efforts to make inroads in the black South.

Katnzelson also has a highly interesting chapter about military desegregation-he shares the difficulties venerated historian John Hope Franklin had when trying to enlist to illustrate the situation for black people-and how, once admitted, black soldiers also were denied their fair share of access to benefits under the landmark GI Bill.  Among other items, the bill paved the way for veterans to attend college and purchase homes, both significant aspects of entry to middle-class life.  While Katznelson makes it clear that the bill did in fact benefit many black soldiers, he also shows how large amounts of discrimination occurred in the administration of the legislation.

Local control was a key factor in the perpetuation of affirmative action for white people.  He shows how, even when supported at the federal level, black people often confronted local officials who were hostile to the prospects of their receiving the benefits to which the law entitled them.

Katznelson also makes it clear that the national Southern politicians and local officialis acted with the knowledge and tacit support of other legislators.  He includes a telling section in which Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was known for his liberal views on race, did not push his colleagues to make further progress on the issue.  He does the same with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s not forcefully advancing anti-lynching legislation, and strikes an effective balance between showing how politicians thought at the time without excusing the moral consequences of their action.

When Affirmative Action Was White’s final chapter proposes some current approaches to the policy to invigorate and ultimately eliminate the need for its necessity within a generation.  Here Katznelson relies on the doctrine of specific remedies advanced by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in the 1978 Bakke case.  Although this is by far the book’s least effective section, it does not detract from the work’s overall quality.  

When Affirmative Action Was White is a well-researched revision that provides much-needed context to a complex issue that all too often is reduced to pitting people against each other.

Black History Month: Paul Hendrickson on the Sons of Mississippi

Paul Hendrickson explores race and its legacy through this photo of seven Mississippi lawmen.

 

The old cliche says that a picture is worth a thousands words, but for Paul Hendrickson it inspired an entire book.

The picture in question is of six Mississippi sheriffs and one deputy gathered in a semi-circle on the eve of James Merideth’s 1962 attempt to enroll at the University of Mississippi.  The men are well dressed-all are wearing a shirt and tie, some sport jackets-and well groomed.  Several have cigarettes or a cigar dangling from their lips.  The group’s attention is focused on a man in the center who is holding a piece of wood like a baseball bat with obvious relish. 

A longtime feature writer for The Washington Post, Hendrickson came across the Life magazine photograph in a book by Charles Moore.  The picture piqued his curiosity, so he decided to explore whose the men were, why they had assembled and what they had bequeathed to their children and grandchildren.

Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, a lyrical, haunting and guardedly hopeful book about race in America and its complicated legacy, is the result.

Hendrickson divides the work into three parts.  The first section profiles each of the men in the photograph, the second is about Merideth, with Moore playing a secondary role, and the third is about the lawmen’s children and grandchildren.

Each section has its own power.

A gifted writer, Hendrickson skillfully intermingles the histories of Mississippi towns, quotes from a wide range of authors- literary giants like Faulkner and James Agee make predictable appearances, but so do respected historians like C. Vann Woodward and John Dittmer as well as psychiatrists like trauma pioneer Judith Herman or Dan Bar-On, who interviewed the sons of Nazis-and telling physical details to create vivid portraits of the South, and, ultimately, the nation. 

The picture is far from clear or cloudless.

Hendrickson opens and closes the book with the murder of black people, the hatred that led white people to take their lives, and the incomplete reckoning the country has done with its brutal past.

The sheriffs in Moore’s picture are part of that past. 

Hendrickson notes that these men, despite appearances of gearing up for battle, ultimately were nowhere to be found when the clash between the Kennedy Administration and Governor Ross Barnett reached its climax.  Still, the role of law enforcement in sanctioning the terror that was often visited on African Americans in the South as a core element of white supremacy is very much what these men embraced, even if they did not participate in the riots that followed Merideth’s contested admission.  

Hendrickson also provides a textured account of Merideth, who in many ways in the book’s central character despite not appearing in the photograph.   Merideth went from being a fearless civil rights icon to working for Jesse Helms, and, ultimately to drumming up support for former Klansman David Duke’s presidential run.  Meredith, as Hendrickson portrays him, is a messianic and somewhat unstable figure scarred by the consequences of his past actions.

Others in the book have different scars.

The book’s final part focuses on the lawmen’s children and grandchildren.  In many cases, the progeny tapped into the ‘good old boy’ network and followed their fathers and grandfathers into law enforcement.  One of Sons’ most memorable chapters involves Ty Ferrell, grandson of one of the sheriffs and a border enforcement agent for the U.S./Mexico border.  The younger Ferrell alternately displays emotional sensitivity and an unconscious replication of the values of white supremacy.  Hendrickson’s layered profile of the grandson creates empathy for the character while still injecting questions about racism’s immorality into the book.

That the racial business of Mississippi and the nation is not finished and that a former hero has strayed to the point where he embraces former enemies whose views have not changed does not mean that no change has happened, however. 

Toward the book’s end, Hendrickson interviews Merideth’s son, who was on the verge of earning his doctorate 40 years from the same university where Barnett tried futiley to bar his father’s entry.  The author also talks with businessman Jim Scott Middleton, son of one of the sherriffs.  The younger Middleton married a Lebanese-American woman and  seeks to be a fair boss by his black employees.  Hendrickson is quick to point out that one of the benefits of his “handsome living” is membership in a country club that excludes black people. 

“In some ways, that seems about the right metaphor for Mississippi in a new century: all the new shadows of the overhanging Confederate past, along with the new shoots so susceptible to quick loss, trampling,” Hendrickson writes.

A fitting thought to end the exploration of Mississippi’s and America’s muddied racial past.  Those who would proclaim that Barack Obama’s election means that we have now entered into a post-racial society,  would do well to read Hendrickson’s fine work.

On the other hand, those who would dismiss Obama’s victory as devoid of meaning because of the nation’s incomplete transformation might draw new insight from poet Seamus Heaney’s words, which frame Sons’ third section:

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Black History Month: Bayard Rustin in the Eye of the Storm

Bayard Rustin's life is depicted in a new play and a biography by John D'Emilio.

The modern civil rights era produced many iconic images.

Rosa Parks sitting alone and steadfast in a Montgomery bus.  John Lewis and other students bloodied but unbowed during the 1961 Freedom Rides in Alabama.  Bull Connor’s minions turning on the fire hoses and releasing the dogs against protesters in Birmingham in 1963.

And, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. departing from the script at the Lincoln Memorial and proclaiming his dream of racial equality at the March on Washington in August, 1963.

Each of those pictures, and the people in them, have endured in our collective memory.   The courage, determination and tenacity of people like Parks, Lewis and King have been widely acknowledged by the larger society.

Other equally brave people have been less remembered, through.

Movement strategist, dedicated social justice proponent and March on Washington architect Bayard Rustin is one of them.

During the past few years, though, Rustin and his accomplishments have been pulled out of obscurity, where they languished in part due to people’s discomfort with his homosexuality.

Tomorrow, Eye of the Storm, a play about Rustin’s life, will debut at the William Hatch Auditorium, 1000 North Ridgeland Avenue, in Oak Park, Illinois. 

Performed by members of the Open Door Repertory Company, the play will be attended by luminaries like U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis, the Honorable David Pope, President of the Village of Oak Park, State Senator Don Harmon, and both State Representatives Karen Yarbrough and Deborah Graham.

People interested in purchasing tickets or who want more information can call 708-802-1723 or visit www.opendoorrep.org.

For those who are unable to attend the play or who simply want more information about Rustin’s complex and contributory life, there is University of Illinois-Chicago Professor John D’Emilio’s award-winning biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

Rustin lived a rich, long and fascinating life, and D’Emilio, who co-authored with Estelle Freedman the pioneering Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, is more than up to the task of rendering it in vivid detail and a coherent framework. 

The Rustin that emerges on the pages of Lost Prophet is a gifted, charismatic man with a lifelong and passionate commitment to social justice and a near unparalleled strategic vision.   Yet, because of societal prejudices against gay and lesbian people, Rustin endured repeated periods of being outcast from, and betrayed by, members of the movement. 

His protests against injustice began early. 

D’Emilio draws on interviews with aging residents of Rustin’s home town in West Chester, Pennsylvania, who recalled his refusing to leave a restaurant where he could not get service until he eventually was ejected.

As a young man, Rustin joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he was powerfully influenced by pacificst A.J. Muste.  Rustin showed himself willing to sacrifice for his ideals by serving 28 months in prison, starting in 1944, for refusing to register for, and serve in, the United States Army. 

This experience, and his subsequent travel to India, where he was formally trained in the Gandhian discipline of nonviolence in many ways formed the crucible on which his unyielding commitment to social change was forged.

Rustin first intersected with King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where King initially was a compromise choice as leader because he was new in town and thus had no prior negative history with different factions within the black community.  The two formed a close bond, in which Rustin served largely as mentor and tactician.

It was a fruitful partnership. 

Although Rustin worked tirelessly for the causes he believed in so fiercely, he preferred to stay in the background and out of the public limelight.  King emerged as the face of the burgeoning movement, helping to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and taking the effort to dismantle legal segregation throughout the South.

There was a catch, though.

Even during his days in prison as a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin experienced difficulty due to his being gay in a society that arguably opposed homosexuality even more vehemently than it suppressed the rights of African Americans. 

His 1953 arrest in Pasadena, California for “lewd”conduct-Rustin was performing oral sex on a man in a parked car-was just one of the times his sexual orientation became the source of public sanction and later ostracism from within and without the movement.

Rustin endured many painful periods in his life in which people dear to him, from Muste to King, either urged him to “discipline” himself by essentially repressing his sexuality  or cut ties with the man who had been responsible for much of the organization’s success.

It is important to note that some of the attacks came from within the community.  Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, for example, called Rustin out, precipitating King’s shunning Rustin during a very dark period for Rustin in the late 50s. 

D’Emilio effectively shows the sense of betrayal Rustin experienced on a personal level while also analyzing the anti-gay pressures and structures that existed in the society at the time.

At moments, the movement held firm. 

Before the March on Washington, South Carolina Senator and former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond started raising the issue of Rustin’s homosexuality as a way to distract from and discredit the impending march.

Where previously other leaders had forced Rustin into exile from the action he cherished and believed in so deeply, this time they confronted Thurmond and defended the march’s planner.  A. Philip Randolph emerges during this part of the book as a particularly staunch supporter of Rustin.

Like many advocates for nonviolence, Rustin found himself at increasing odds with members of the Black Power movement as the 60s progressed.  D’Emilio also explores Rustin’s surprising reluctance to forthrightly denounce the War in Vietnam, showing how his support of Democratic Party nominee Hubert Humphrey during the 1968 presidential election left him estranged from black militant and white antiwar protestors.

During that time, Rustin was  called a strategist without a movement-a label, which, if accurate, was not permanent.

During the last two decades of his life, Rustin turned his focus to global issues, working for the rights of Southeast Asian refugees and supporting the efforts of Lech Walesa and others in the Solidarity movement.

He also spoke out about gay rights.

Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner  and a source of great joy during the last 10 years of his life, encouraged him in that cause.

In 1987,  after a lifetime of working for social change, Rustin died.

Hopefully, D’Emilio’s textured portrait, the play and other efforts to preserve Rustin’s legacy will lead to this dynamic and valiant warrior for social justice being remembered by a grateful society for the vital contributions he made.

Black History Month: Gwen Ifill on The Breakthrough

Gwen Ifill puts Obama's victory in broader context in The Breakthrough.

 

Beyond his historic run for the presidency of the United States, Barack Obama has been a boon for the publishing industry.

In addition to his two memoirs, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope,  and a campaign primer, there have been close to a dozen books about Obama, his prospects for election, and, since November, the meaning of his triumph.

Longtime journalist Gwen Ifill, who moderated the debate between then-Sen. Joe Biden and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has entered the fray, too.  Her debut book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, puts Obama’s victory in context with other post-civil rights generation African Americans who have won political office at local, state, and federal levels.

The Breakthrough is an accessible and engaging read.  Ifill begins in the introduction by recounting some of her initial experiences as a reporter in South Boston during the 1970s busing era.  Racial tension was so high that she would get daily dispatches from the school superintendent about what had happened rather than go to the school and the neighborhood.  From this starting point, of course, Obama’s victory to the highest office in the land is nothing short of remarkable, and, as Ifill notes in the book, was inconceivable for many, many African-Americans.

His success has not come without a struggle-a fact that would not surprise Frederick Douglass, even if the source of some of the challenge would.  The section on Obama’s election, for instance, talks about the generational tension between folks from the civil rights era who would both at times tell the younger generation they could not understand what they had been through nor, in some cases, could the conceive of Obama’s victory being possible. 

One of the many interesting anecdotes that shows this latter point occurs when venerable activist Andrew Young says that Obama would make an excellent candidate for president-in 2016.  Ifill also shows the public disputes that emerged between Jesse Jackson, Sr. and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. at different points during the campaign as examples of that trend, too.

Ifill’s campaign recap includes a chapter onthe isssue of race and gender as manifested through the contest between Obama and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.  Ifilll argues that Obama did a balancing act about his race, but ultimately tried not to make his campaign about his race.  Clinton, on the other hand, cited her gender as a source of electoral difficulty, particularly when her once seemingly  inevitable maruch to the nomination started to falter.   This chapter is particularly interesting because it shows the divisions within the black community before Obama’s campaign gained steam, and how both black men and women who had supported Clinton switched sides as the campaign progressed.

Ifill also examines the issue of black identity, which emerged through the question of whether Obama was ‘black enough’?  One of the book’s most enetertaining nuggets comes from comedian Dick Gregory, who asked at an event sponsored by Tavis Smiley  how African Americans could embrace Bill Clinton as the ’first black president’ and then question whether Obama was sufficiently black. 

 Obama is a major figure throughout the book, but Ifill’s spends full chapters on other black elected officials like Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and U.S. Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama.  Young, talented, and black, to paraphrase Lorraine Hansberry, these politicians are illustrative of a deeper trend, Ifill maintains-the electoral success of the post-civil rights generation.

Beyond these chapter length portraits of individuals, Ifill also has intriguing chapters about black political dynasties like the Fords of Tennessee and the Patersons of New York, and, near the end of the book, of other individuals who have had electoral success. 

The Breakthrough is a breezy survey of the community from which Obama comes and that was critical to his November victory.  Remarkably timely-Ifill includes scenes from the election night, like the elder Jackson shedding tears at Chicago’s Grant Park-and full of insight, the book, Ifill’s first, is a helpful step in placing Obama’s election in a broader cultural context.

Ifill also deserves credit for her analysis of Obama’s racial balancing act, which consisted of being perceived as suffciently but not excessively black by black and white voters, respectively.  She shows some of those calculations at the convention, for example, where Obama’s half-sister who is Indonesian appeared, while his half-sister who is Kenyan did not.  She similarly effective in noting that being elected is not the same as governing, pointing out repeatedly how Patrick’s tin ear and Booker’s lack of ties within the Newark community have impeded their abilities to enact their legislative agendas. 

Although it is not a work of history, the book is a bit thin on historical background beyond the civil rights era and an occasional Frederick Douglass quote.  More basically, she concentrates more on the number of elected officials rather than on voter turnout, which can be a more accurate indicator of the community’s political health.   While this did rise significantly during Obama’s election, on the whole voting in elections and other indicators of civic participation have declined in black and other communities during the past decades.

Still, there is no mistaking the monumental significance of Obama’s victory and the existence of a growing number of black officials, a number of whom like Patrick have been elected by a majority of white voters, throughout the country. 

Ifill posits at the book’s conclusion that the day may come when enough black officials have been elected that a subsequent victory will not be considered consequential.  That may well be true, and, if it happens soon enough, we will be able to credit her with her accurate prediction.