Racism Is Behind the Black-white Wealth Gap, according to latest study.

Why are white families $95,000 richer than Black families? This is a question that a recent study tries to answer.

According to a report by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, the wealth gap between African-American families and white families has jumped dramatically in 23 years.In fact, the difference in financial assets between these two groups has increased over four times in a generation, from $20,000 in 1984 to $95,000 in 2007.

The Brandeis report also found that middle-income whites experienced a greater increase in net worth than high income Blacks. Average white families earning $30,000 had accumulated $74,000, while Blacks earning more than $50,000 owned only $18,000, for a wealth gap of $56,000.

To make things worse, 10 percent of African-Americans owed at least $3,600 in debt, nearly doubling their debt burden since 1984. And sadly, at least a quarter of Black families had no assets to rely upon when times get rough.

So, what's the problem here? The problem is that income equality is not translating into wealth equality and economic security for black households. Some of this is due to bad public policy, including tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, and other measures that have redistributed wealth upwards-- to those who are already rich and arguably don't need more.

But there is another reason, namely, institutional racism in housing, labor and lending. The deregulation of the lending market has resulted in systemic discrimination against people of color and the poor, who pay more for credit. Those who live paycheck to paycheck borrow just to make ends meet, depending increasingly on payday lending, a.k.a. legal loan sharks, and check cashing stores that prey on these poorer communities. Blacks and Latinos have been steered into risky, costly and sketchy subprime mortgages, more than twice the rate of whites with the same income. The foreclosure crisis has wiped out what little wealth many of these families owned, placing a stranglehold on the ability of the African-American community to build wealth.

Similarly, according to another report, communities of color were disproportionately cut out of conventional mortgage loans after the housing bubble burst. A collaborative effort of several nonprofit groups, the study is called Paying More for the American Dream IV: The Decline of Prime Mortgage Lending in Communities of Color. From 2006 to 2008, prime lending in minority areas decreased 60.3 percent, compared to 28.4 percent in predominantly white areas.

What are the solutions? Well, to their credit, the researchers at Brandeis recommend the use of public policy to close the racial wealth gap. For example, wealth-building policies must specifically target families of color. And an effective Consumer Financial Protection Agency would guarantee fairness for consumers who borrow money to pay for basic expenses and necessities. Additionally, the American Dream study recommends stronger fair lending enforcement; requiring banks to fund the revitalization of damaged neighborhoods; halting foreclosures; expanding the Community Reinvestment Act to promote responsible lending and investment, and expanding the Mortgage Disclosure Act to shed light on discriminatory practices.

These suggestions make a great deal of sense, but since public policy alone is not enough, I would take it a step further. Over the years, African-Americans have found themselves in a recession or depression, regardless of the general state of the U.S. economy. Needless to say, when America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia, as the old adage goes. Perhaps the Black community should consider a two-pronged strategy in turning their economic lives around.

First, "do for self" and "cooperative economics" make more sense now than ever before. What better time is there than the Great Recession to embark on a plan for economic empowerment? Black folks had their backs against the wall since day one in this country. During Jim Crow segregation, the African-American community banded together out of necessity and supported one another. They created businesses and services that the community relied upon, causing dollars to circulate throughout the community. Some black enclaves, such as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were burned down to the ground by white mobs who hated on their success. However, this is not to romanticize a difficult period for black America. Nor am I advocating some Booker T. Washington-esqe, self-help, up-by-the-bootstraps approach that ignores racial injustice and systemic inequality.

This leads to my second point. We also have a need to acknowledge and combat institutional racism. Racism in this country is not merely a few nutty Klansmen sporting white sheets and burning crosses. Rather, we are dealing with institutions and structures in society that discriminate against certain people based on race, and in a material, dollars-and-cents way. We should fight institutional racism by holding our elected officials' feet to the fire in terms of public policy reforms. In addition, we must hold corporations accountable for their business practices, and boycott those financial institutions that exploit people of color.

Only then will we begin to close this ever-widening racial wealth gap.
(David A. Love)

Black Bombshell, Lena Horne, Dies at 92.
Lena Horne, 92, an electrifying performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented Black women and who enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in films, died Sunday 9 May 2010 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Ms. Horne, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first Black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.



"What people tend not to fully comprehend today is what Lena Horne did to transform the image of the African American woman in Hollywood," said Donald Bogle, a film historian.
"Movies are a powerful medium and always depicted African American women before Lena Horne as hefty, mammy-like maids who were ditzy and giggling," Bogle said. "Lena Horne becomes the first one the studios begin to look at differently. . . . Really just by being there, being composed and onscreen with her dignity intact paved the way for a new day" for black actresses.
He said Ms. Horne's influence was apparent within a few years of her leaving Hollywood, starting with actress Dorothy Dandridge's movie work in the 1950s. Later, Halle Berry, who won the 2001 best actress Oscar for "Monster's Ball," called Ms. Horne an inspiration.


Ms. Horne's reputation in Hollywood rested on a handful of musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: "Cabin in the Sky," as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie "Rochester" Anderson; and "Stormy Weather," in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.
In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South.
"Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she told the New York Times in 1957. "So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut."
In Hollywood, she received previously unheard-of star treatment for a Black actor. Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Horne in movies and advertisements as glamorously as white beauties including Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.
The media sometimes described Ms. Horne in terms that upset her.


"I hated those awful phrases they used to trot out to describe me!" she once said. "Who the hell wants to be a 'chocolate chanteuse' ?"
Ms. Horne was also frustrated by infrequent movie work and feeling limited in her development as an actress. She confronted studio officials about roles she thought demeaning, a decision that eventually hurt her.

James Gavin, a historian of cabaret acts who has written a biography of Ms. Horne, said: "Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar."


Ms. Horne appeared on television and at major concerts halls in New York, London and Paris. She starred on Broadway twice, and her 1981 revue, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," set the standard for the one-person musical show, reviewers said. The performance also netted her a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards.
Gavin said Ms. Horne cultivated a "ferocious" singing personality through her flashing eyes and teeth.
"Unlike Perry Como and Bing Crosby, who were warm, familiar presences, Lena Horne was a fierce black woman and not a warm and fuzzy presence," Gavin said. "She was formidable and the first black cabaret star for white society."
Ms. Horne said she felt a need to act aloof onstage to protect herself from unwanted advances early in her career, especially from white audiences.
"They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman," she told the New York Daily News in 1997. "The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach. . . . I am too proud to let them think they can have any personal contact with me. They get the singer, but they are not going to get the woman."


For her repertoire, she chose the sophisticated ballads of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Billy Strayhorn. She loved the music but also said she liked surprising the white audience who expected Black entertainers to sing hot jazz or blues and dance wildly.
In her singing, Ms. Horne showed great range and could convincingly shift between jazz, blues and cabaret ballads. New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised her "sense of dynamics that allowed her to whisper and wheedle and shout."
In the early 1960s, Ms. Horne said she felt her sophisticated act sounded increasingly obsolete as she saw a younger generation at sit-ins and marches protesting racial discrimination.
"I thought, 'How can I sing about a penthouse in the sky, when with the housing restrictions the way they are, I wouldn't be allowed to rent the place?' " she told the New York Times in 1981.
Ms. Horne struggled for years to find a public role on race matters. Her earliest mentors urged her to remain reserved and graceful in public, what she called "a good little symbol."
In the late 1940s and 1950s, she chose to focus on quietly defying segregation policies at upscale hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas where she performed. At the time, it was customary for black entertainers to stay in Black neighborhoods, but Ms. Horne successfully insisted that she and her musicians be allowed to stay wherever she entertained. One Las Vegas establishment reportedly had its chambermaids burn Ms. Horne's sheets.
In 1963, Ms. Horne appeared at the civil rights March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Ms. Horne also used her celebrity to rally front-line civil rights activists in the South and was a fundraiser for civil right groups including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women.
Looking back, she said her legacy on race was complicated by her ambition. She said she married the white conductor and bandleader Lennie Hayton in 1947 -- her second marriage -- to advance her career because "he could get me into places no black manager could."
"It was wrong of me, but as a Black woman, I knew what I had against me," she told the New York Times in 1981. "He was a nice man who wasn't thinking all these things, and because he was a nice man and because he was in my corner, I began to love him.'"
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father was a civil servant and gambler who largely abandoned the family, although Ms. Horne reconnected with him in the late 1930s. Her mother, an actress, was largely absent from Ms. Horne's early life because of work on the black theater circuit.
Shifted at first among friends and relatives, Ms. Horne was raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, a stern social worker and suffragette in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Ms. Horne said she was influenced by her grandmother's "polite ferocity."


In 1933, when she was 16, Ms. Horne was reunited with her mother and new stepfather, a white Cuban. It was the peak of the Depression, and they lived on relief in Harlem. Ms. Horne was pushed into a job at the Cotton Club by her mother, who knew the Harlem nightclub's choreographer.
The segregated club attracted white clientele who liked to watch the top Black entertainers of the day, such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, surrounded by what was promoted as a "tall, tan and terrific" chorus of girls.
"I could carry a tune, but I could hardly have been called a singer," Ms. Horne said. "I was tall and skinny and I had very little going me for except a pretty face and long, long hair that framed it rather nicely."
Ms. Horne began by wearing three large feathers and doing a fan dance, but she took singing lessons and gradually won better parts.
Ms. Horne made $25 a week for three shows nightly seven days a week. Her stepfather went to see the racketeering club owners to raise Ms. Horne's salary. In reply, they had his head shoved down a toilet, Ms. Horne said.
She was soon hired to sing with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra, a leading black orchestra. Sissle emphasized decorum, even when the band members were not allowed to enter the hotel through the front door. In Indianapolis, the band slept on circus grounds when no hotel would put them up.
Exhausted by 19, she fled to her father's home in Pittsburgh and married a friend of his, Louis J. Jones, a minor Democratic Party operative. She and Jones had two children, Gail and Edwin, but the marriage disintegrated over money quarrels.
As she returned to singing and struggled to find work, one club owner told her she looked "too refined for a Negro." Her agent advised her to "pass as Spanish," but she refused. She appeared in a "race movie" intended for black audiences called "The Duke Is Tops" (1938) and in the Broadway musical "Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939."
White bandleader Charlie Barnet was said to have remarked when first seeing her, "Wow, who are you?" He then hired her in 1940 and provided Ms. Horne with some of her earliest recordings, including two hits, "You're My Thrill" and "Good for Nothing' Joe."
Helped by record producer John Hammond, she won a long engagement at Manhattan's Cafe Society Downtown, the first integrated nightclub in the United States. She had a stormy affair with married boxer Joe Louis, a regular at the nightspot, and befriended entertainer and social activist Paul Robeson. Her friendship with Robeson, a communist sympathizer, was a key factor that led to her brief blacklisting a decade later.
The work at Cafe Society Downtown prompted ecstatic reviews and was a major step in Ms. Horne's career. She was soon in Hollywood singing at the Little Troc club, and film studio composer-arranger Roger Edens urged her to make a screen test for MGM.
"I didn't know him, but he went to his bosses at MGM and told them about me," Ms. Horne once said. "I wasn't impressed because I didn't want to be in California, and I hadn't ever thought about the movies.
"My father flew in from Pittsburgh, and we sort of laughingly went to the studio. My father was, in fact, fighting against the idea of my going into the movies, because neither of us liked the roles that we African Americans were obliged to play at the time. So I thought nothing of it, but lo and behold, they took me! Friends like [director] Vincente Minnelli, [composer] Billy Strayhorn and [bandleader] Count Basie all convinced me that I should take the job."


Working closely with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, Ms. Horne said she wanted to "try to establish a different kind of image for Negro women." They successfully challenged the casting system that had long marginalized black performers onscreen by having them portray servants, minstrels or jungle natives.
To Ms. Horne's surprise, her efforts to overcome servile screen parts was resented by many black actors who viewed her as a threat more than a pioneer. She said she was perceived as a danger to the system of informal "captains" in the Black acting community who worked as liaisons with film producers when they needed "natives" for the latest Tarzan picture.
"I was not trying to embarrass anyone or show up my colleagues," Ms. Horne told film critic Richard Schickel for his 1965 biography, "Lena." "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into. It was no crusade, though of course I hoped that if I could set my own terms in the movies and also be successful, then others might be able to follow."
Bored from infrequent movie work, she began taking outside singing engagements and devoted more time to advocating fair employment and anti-lynching laws. She also filed a complaint with the NAACP when she sang for soldiers at Fort Reilly, Kan., on a studio-sponsored tour and saw German prisoners of war seated ahead of black soldiers. This complaint irritated the studio.
MGM producer Arthur Freed was also unhappy that Ms. Horne refused to act in a Broadway show he had backed, "St. Louis Woman." She said the black characters were clichéd and offensive. She said Freed took revenge by turning down her requests for plum movie assignments.
She returned to a lucrative singing career. At one point in the mid-1950s, she made $12,500 a week singing at Las Vegas casinos. Her 1957 best-selling album of jazz standards, "At the Waldorf-Astoria," captured her at a peak moment -- at the tony New York hotel where she long performed, backed by an orchestra conducted by her husband, Hayton.
She and Harry Belafonte co-starred on Broadway in "Jamaica," a 1958 musical by Harold Arlen and E.Y. "Yip" Harburg. She received a Tony Award nomination playing a Jamaican dressmaker who dreams of a push-button life in America.
In 1969, she won a leading part in a dramatic movie, as a brothel madam and the lover of a white town sheriff played by Richard Widmark in "Death of a Gunfighter." She later called the film "too little, too late."
Ms. Horne continued her active singing schedule, appearing with Belafonte and Tony Bennett. She also appeared on "Sesame Street" singing to Kermit the Frog and played Glinda the Good in "The Wiz," a 1978 musical based on "The Wizard of Oz" and directed by Sidney Lumet, who was then her son-in-law.
After the triumph of her 1981 Broadway show, she led an increasingly isolated life in her Manhattan apartment. Her 1993 appearance honoring composer Billy Strayhorn at the JVC Jazz Festival led to her first album in a decade, "We'll Be Together Again." Her 1995 release, "An Evening With Lena Horne," won the Grammy Award for best jazz vocal performance.
Her son died in 1970, at 29, from a kidney ailment. Hayton, from whom she had long been separated, died in 1971.


Ms. Horne spoke of her one-woman show as the most liberating moment of her life, saying her identity was clear to her because "I no longer have to be a 'credit,' I don't have to be a 'symbol' to anybody. I don't have to be a 'first' to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

Dorothy Height, Civil Rights Pioneer, dead at 98.

Dorothy I. Height, 98, a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades, died 27 April 2010 of natural causes.

Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s.

She died at 3:41 a.m. at Howard University Hospital.

Ms. Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, relinquishing the title in 1997. The 4 million-member advocacy group consists of 34 national and 250 community-based organizations. It was founded in 1935 by educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who was one of Ms. Height's mentors.

As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Height "the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans."

"Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way," Obama said. "And even in the final weeks of her life -- a time when anyone else would have enjoyed their well-earned rest -- Dr. Height continued her fight to make our nation a more open and inclusive place for people of every race, gender, background and faith."

In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Height helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin and John Lewis, who later served as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.

Ms. Height was arguably the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership, but she never drew the major media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time.

In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women's rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King's request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.

"At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there," Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.

As a champion of social justice, Ms. Height was best known during the early years of her career for her struggles to overcome racial prejudice.

She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women's rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.

"Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping Black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of Black people," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.

As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Ms. Height was instrumental in organizing and sponsoring programs that emphasized self-help and self-reliance.

Those included nutrition, child care, housing and career counseling. In response to a public TV program, "The Vanishing Black Family," Ms. Height helped create and organize the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which has been held on the Mall and in cities across the country annually since 1985. The gatherings are intended to honor the traditions, strength and history of African American families while seeking solutions to such social problems as teen pregnancy and drug abuse.

"The reunion is as important today as some of our marches were in the past," Ms. Height said in 1992.

In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, which was led by Louis Farrakhan, the chief minister of the Nation of Islam. "I am here because you are here," she declared. Two years later, at 85, she sat at the podium all day, in the whipping wind and chill rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia.

"She was a dynamic woman with a resilient spirit, who was a role model for women and men of all faiths, races and perspectives. For her, it wasn't about the many years of her life, but what she did with them," said former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman, a close friend who has been running day-to-day operations at the National Council.

Herman called Ms. Height "a national treasure who lived life abundantly. She will be greatly missed, not only by those of us who knew her well, but by the countless beneficiaries of her enduring legacy."

Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond on March 24, 1912, and she grew up in Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended racially integrated schools. But she felt the lash of racial bigotry early in her life. A music teacher in her mostly white elementary school appointed her student director of the school chorus, but a new principal forbade her to take that position. At the next school assembly, the chorus refused to stand and sing until Ms. Height was reinstated as leader, and the principal relented.

The principal subsequently became one of her staunchest supporters, Ms. Height recalled in her 2003 memoir, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates."

As a high school senior and the valedictorian, she won a national oratorical contest, and with it a $1,000 college scholarship. But the college of her choice, Barnard in New York, had already admitted its quota of Black students -- two. When Ms. Height applied, she was informed that she would have to wait at least a semester before she could enroll.

Instead, she went to New York University, where she graduated in three years and received a master's degree in educational psychology in her fourth year. In 1980, Ms. Height was chosen to receive Barnard's Medal of Distinction -- the highest honor the college can give.

As a young woman, Ms. Height made money through jobs such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor's shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem with composer W.C. Handy.

Ms. Height began her professional career as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She got her start as a civil rights activist through the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and from the pastor's son, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who later represented Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ms. Height later said that as an officer of the Harlem Christian Youth Council, "I was one of the multitude whose first experience as a civil rights activist was in walking and talking with merchants on 125th Street."

After attending an international church youth conference in London in the summer of 1937, Ms. Height returned to New York with the conviction that she needed to operate from a broader base than that of a welfare caseworker. She found her opportunity that November at the Harlem branch of the YWCA during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt. Madam Mary Macloud Bethune, president of the Harlem YWCA, was impressed by Ms. Height's poise and style in greeting the president's wife, and she promptly offered her a job. "You come back -- we need you," Ms. Height recalled Bethune saying.

Quitting her job as a welfare caseworker, Ms. Height joined the staff of the Harlem YWCA. She remained a full-time YWCA staffer until 1975, serving the last 18 years simultaneously as president of the National Council of Negro Women.

As a child, she had once been turned away from the Pittsburgh YWCA swimming pool. As a YWCA staff member, she was instrumental in bringing about an interracial charter for Ys in 1946.

In the 1940s, Ms. Height came to Washington as chief of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch. She joined the staff of the national YWCA board in 1944, and, until 1975, she remained on that staff with a variety of responsibilities, including leadership training and interracial and ecumenical education. In 1965, she organized and became the director of the YWCA's Center for Racial Justice, and she held that position until retiring from the YWCA board in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India, and she directed studies around the world on issues involving human rights.

Ms. Height became national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1947, and she held that position until 1957, when she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Over the next four decades, she established a national reputation as a graceful and insistent voice for civil rights and women's rights. She was tall and stately -- some said regal -- and she spoke in a tone that always commanded attention. She rarely had to raise her voice.

"If the times aren't ripe, you have to ripen the times," she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. "I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."

Ms. Height never married. She is survived by one sister, Anthanette Height Aldridge of New York City. She was often described as the "glue" that held the family of Black civil rights leaders together. She did much of her work out of the public spotlight, in quiet meetings and conversations, and she was widely connected at the top levels of power and influence in government and business.

In the 1960s, Ms. Height was uncomfortable with the "black power" rallying cry of young civil rights militants, and she said that the phrase "has harmed our cause. . . . The fact of the matter is that we do not want black power for American Negroes. We don't want white power for American whites. . . . The kind of power we seek is the power of freedom in a colorless society -- the power to help build a constructive nation and a constructive world together with our fellow Americans."

But in time, Ms. Height would revise her opinion and say the "black power" slogan had merit. "White power in the system in which we live is a reality. . . . Simply talking about bettering race relations without changing the power relations will get us nowhere."

As the women's rights movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, Ms. Height forged alliances with white feminist leaders, while disagreeing periodically on matters of tactics and racial emphasis. "African American women have advanced in every field that women have advanced, but the sad point is that those are the few and not the many," she said.

Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women sponsored voter registration drives and organized an education foundation for student activists who interrupted their education to do civil rights work.

Another 1960s program, Wednesdays in Mississippi, was a favorite of Ms. Height's. It consisted of weekly trips to Mississippi by interracial groups of women to assist at Freedom Schools and voter registration campaigns. This was often perilous work, especially during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who streamed into Mississippi were routinely harassed, sometimes beaten and, in a few cases, killed, most notably, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the council helped organize and operate development projects in African countries. It ran a "pig bank" project in rural Mississippi in which pigs were given to poor, hungry families so they could raise them, with the understanding that two pigs from subsequent litters would be put back into the bank for another family.

Over the years, there were fundraising drives for a statue of Madam Mary McCloud Bethune and acquisition of a large and imposing headquarters building in downtown Washington to house the National Council and the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute. The building, with white oak woodwork, a marble staircase and fluted cast-iron columns, stands at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the site of what was once a slave market. For years after stepping down as president of the National Council, Ms. Height made daily visits to her office there, using a walker or a wheelchair as she became infirm.

"She not only expected us to keep going, she instructed us to keep going," Herman said. "She would ball that fist up and say that the National Council of Negro Women wasn't about one or two persons. She balled her fist to say that you can strike a mighty blow when you make a fist and work together."

Ms. Height had served on the advisory council of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the National Advisory Council on Aging. Her awards included 36 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities, including Harvard and Princeton. On March 24, 2004, her 92nd birthday, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration Congress can bestow.

But Ms. Height often urged her co-workers to "stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly."

Dr. Henry Louis Gates Let's U.S. Off The Hook In Slavery Blame Game.

Ending The Slavery Blame Game.
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times called, "Ending the Slavery Blame Game." In the piece, Gates effectively argues that the fight for reparations is convoluted and somewhat mitigated by the fact that African elites participated in the slave trade. While describing complex business deals made between some African leadership and the Europeans who brought Africans to the New World, it almost appears as though Gates is saying that this disturbing relationship somehow undermines the right of African-Americans to hold our government accountable for its involvement in crimes committed against our people.

At very least, I am under the assumption that by "ending the slavery blame game," Gates is arguing that we should stop blaming the United States government and white America for the rape, murder, castration, lynching and beating of our ancestors.

Sorry Dr. Gates, but I must respectfully (or perhaps not so respectfully) disagree. If a young girl is sold into prostitution by her own parents, the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused the young woman. He can't simply say, "Her parents made a deal with me, so you should stop the blame game."

In other words, the United States, as a broad and powerful industrial entity, benefited from slavery to the tune of several trillion dollars. Much of this wealth was passed down from one white man to another, and was always out of the grasp of the black men, women and children who gave their lives on American soil in order to earn it. As a result, the median net worth of the African-American family is roughly one-tenth that of white American families and we have consistently higher unemployment due to our inability to create jobs, since white Americans own most businesses.

These facts hold true without regard to how the African-American holocaust started in the first place. They also hold true because wealth and power are commodities that are passed down inter-generationally, and we missed out on all of this because we were slaves. What occurred after we left Africa can and must be considered independently from what happened while our forefathers were in the mother land.

Beyond the indisputable financial damage caused by slavery, there is also a price to be paid for pain, suffering and aggregate trauma. Even the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolishes slavery, has a clause stating that it's still OK to enslave another American, as long as that person has been convicted of a crime. Given that the United States incarcerates 5.8 times more black men than South Africa did during the height of apartheid, it's easy to argue that the human rights violations of American slavery continue to this day.

The arbitrary label of "convict" is used against black men in a disproportionate fashion as a loophole for American corporations to continue to profit from slave labor. I don't want to play the "blame game." But mainstream media must not play the "irresponsibility game," by promoting apologist African-American scholars who are willing to write off 400 years of systemically oppressive behavior. While the Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" approach makes some of us more comfortable, the truth is that America cannot become truly post-racial until it overcomes its past-racial influences.

I am not sure why Gates has gone out of his way to assuage white guilt in America. I hope that's not the price a black man must pay in order to write an op-ed in the New York Times. Perhaps his PBS specials, in which he goes out of his way to prove that he is actually from Europe, is his way of fitting into the society that never embraced the little black boy from West Virginia (Gates writes extensively about being rejected by white women as a child). Henry Louis Gates seems to have spent his entire life proving to the world that he is a "big shot," because simply being a black man may never have been quite good enough.

As Gates once wrote on his Yale University application, "As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself." Gates' words remind us that the damage of oppression can be debilitating, and we can spend our entire lives overcompensating. When our spirit is torn apart by racial oppression, white acceptance and validation are sometimes necessary in order to make us whole.

Putting Henry Louis Gates to the side, a point must be clearly made. If there are African elites to be held responsible for the atrocities committed against Africans in America, then we can accept that. But while certain citizens of Africa can be found guilty for their contribution to the slave trade, America must also be held accountable for its decision to exploit slavery over the last 400 years. It's really just that simple.
(By Dr. Boyce Watkins)

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the initiator of the National Conversation on Race. For more information, please visit BoyceWatkins.com.

Ending The Slavery Blame Game.
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times called, "Ending the Slavery Blame Game." In the piece, Gates effectively argues that the fight for reparations is convoluted and somewhat mitigated by the fact that African elites participated in the slave trade. While describing complex business deals made between some African leadership and the Europeans who brought Africans to the New World, it almost appears as though Gates is saying that this disturbing relationship somehow undermines the right of African-Americans to hold our government accountable for its involvement in crimes committed against our people.

At very least, I am under the assumption that by "ending the slavery blame game," Gates is arguing that we should stop blaming the United States government and white America for the rape, murder, castration, lynching and beating of our ancestors.

Sorry Dr. Gates, but I must respectfully (or perhaps not so respectfully) disagree. If a young girl is sold into prostitution by her own parents, the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused the young woman. He can't simply say, "Her parents made a deal with me, so you should stop the blame game."

In other words, the United States, as a broad and powerful industrial entity, benefited from slavery to the tune of several trillion dollars. Much of this wealth was passed down from one white man to another, and was always out of the grasp of the black men, women and children who gave their lives on American soil in order to earn it. As a result, the median net worth of the African-American family is roughly one-tenth that of white American families and we have consistently higher unemployment due to our inability to create jobs, since white Americans own most businesses.

These facts hold true without regard to how the African-American holocaust started in the first place. They also hold true because wealth and power are commodities that are passed down inter-generationally, and we missed out on all of this because we were slaves. What occurred after we left Africa can and must be considered independently from what happened while our forefathers were in the mother land.

Beyond the indisputable financial damage caused by slavery, there is also a price to be paid for pain, suffering and aggregate trauma. Even the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolishes slavery, has a clause stating that it's still OK to enslave another American, as long as that person has been convicted of a crime. Given that the United States incarcerates 5.8 times more black men than South Africa did during the height of apartheid, it's easy to argue that the human rights violations of American slavery continue to this day.

The arbitrary label of "convict" is used against black men in a disproportionate fashion as a loophole for American corporations to continue to profit from slave labor. I don't want to play the "blame game." But mainstream media must not play the "irresponsibility game," by promoting apologist African-American scholars who are willing to write off 400 years of systemically oppressive behavior. While the Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" approach makes some of us more comfortable, the truth is that America cannot become truly post-racial until it overcomes its past-racial influences.

I am not sure why Gates has gone out of his way to assuage white guilt in America. I hope that's not the price a black man must pay in order to write an op-ed in the New York Times. Perhaps his PBS specials, in which he goes out of his way to prove that he is actually from Europe, is his way of fitting into the society that never embraced the little black boy from West Virginia (Gates writes extensively about being rejected by white women as a child). Henry Louis Gates seems to have spent his entire life proving to the world that he is a "big shot," because simply being a black man may never have been quite good enough.

As Gates once wrote on his Yale University application, "As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself." Gates' words remind us that the damage of oppression can be debilitating, and we can spend our entire lives overcompensating. When our spirit is torn apart by racial oppression, white acceptance and validation are sometimes necessary in order to make us whole.

Putting Henry Louis Gates to the side, a point must be clearly made. If there are African elites to be held responsible for the atrocities committed against Africans in America, then we can accept that. But while certain citizens of Africa can be found guilty for their contribution to the slave trade, America must also be held accountable for its decision to exploit slavery over the last 400 years. It's really just that simple.
(By Dr. Boyce Watkins)

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the initiator of the National Conversation on Race. For more information, please visit BoyceWatkins.com.