Beale Street, Home of the Blues, by Act of Congress.

2012-01-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

I Will Fight No More Forever.

America's fighting men have come in many guises, shapes and sizes. They have had to fight all of America's enemies, both foreign and domestic. Cadet Webster Smith had to fight his own senior officers, friends, and mentors. In the end he was proud. He had fought the good fight. Even TIME magazine carried the quote of the first cadet in Coast Guard history to be tried by a General Court-martial.

http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,1209244,00.html

Less than 60 days after the verdict was rendered in the Webster Smith case, I predicted that the case would make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court justices are not elected. They are appointed with the advice and consent of the Congress. The Nine Justices of the Supreme Court are the least democratic branch of the federal government. They have no constituency. They do not have to conform to the biases of the majority. They are the Court of Last Resort; so, they are infallible. With few exceptions, they have dealt with evenhandedly with all of America's citizens.

They do not have to sit for re-election. They are appointed for life. They are totally isolated from busy bodies on the Right or Left Side of the political spectrum. With one stroke of the pen, they may act to curb injustices, correct unsavory attitudes, and breathe new life into a living Constitution.

Historically we have looked to them to solve our most vexing social problems. They are America's ultimate arbiters of justice; and, that includes military justice.

Aside from the Webster Smith Case, I cannot think of any case or incident in Coast Guard history that affected more directly the hearts, minds, and daily lives of all members of the United States Coast Guard.

The U.S. Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals had to review the Webster Smith case. It had no choice. Article 66 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, requires the Coast Guard Criminal appeals Court to review all cases of trial by court-martial in which the sentence as approved by the Convening Authority extends to dismissal of a cadet from the Coast Guard, and/or a dishonorable or bad conduct discharge, unless the accused waives appellate review. Webster Smith did not waive appellate review. He appealed his conviction. Oral arguments in the Case of The Appeal of the Court-martial Conviction of Cadet Webster Smith was scheduled for January 16, 2008 in Arlington, Virginia.
A legal brief filed by his lawyers claimed the convictions should have been thrown out because the defense team was not allowed to fully cross-examine one of his accusers during Smith's court martial. They said that meant the jury didn't hear testimony that the accuser, a female cadet, Shelly Roddenbush, had once had consensual sex with a Coast Guard enlisted man and then called it sexual assault. If she lied once, she very well could have lied again.

The Coast Guard Court of of Criminal Appeals is made up of Coast Guard Officers. It has the power to decide matter of both fact and law. Decisions of the Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals may be appealed to the Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces (CAAF). It is made up of five civilian judges, appointed to 15 year terms. It decides only issues of law. Its decisions may be appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court. The Webster Smith Case followed this long and winding path all the way to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of Webster Smith. The justices declined to hear the case without comment.

Webster Smith was proud of his decision to fight the good fight all the way to the end of the road. See TIME magazine June 29, 2006.

http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,1209244,00.html

https://www.amazon.com/author/cgachall.blogspot.com

2012-01-23T12:52:00.001-08:00

The White House Still Stands Today Because A Black Pilot Would Not Fly His Plane Into It.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Luke Weathers Jr. was buried Friday January 20, 2012 at Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, D.C..

His son, Luke Weathers III, 61, said his father and other Black Americans who fought in World War II did so to prove they were men, "and then they wanted their country to love them, but that didn't happen, either." Friday's ceremony, however, finally delivered recognition of his father as a national hero, Weathers said.

This kind of attention to the Tuskegee Airmen is what Lt. Col. Weathers wanted throughout his life, said his daughter, Trina Weathers Boyce. Lt. Col. Weathers was not vain, but he wanted to share the lessons of the airmen's courage in war, their struggles for equality and their victory over a wartime enemy and over racism, she said.

"We are still educating people on the Tuskegee history," Trina Weathers Boyce said, "because it's a big part of American history, not African American or Black history, but American history."

That is equally true of another Black American hero, Captain LeRoy W. Homer Jr.. The victorious do not always live to celebrate their victories. In some cases it is for us the living to celebrate their achievements for them. The world may little note nor long remember what the officers, crew, and passengers of United Flight 93 did for America and western civilization on September 11, 2001, but I urge all Americans to pause and thank God that he gave us a real hero like LeRoy W. Homer Junior.

But for Captain LeRoy W. Homer Jr and the other brave souls on United Flight 93, the White House could very well have been one big black hole on Pennsylvania Avenue on that fateful day. The White House is still there in large measure because Captain LeRoy Homer would not fly his United Airlines Flight 93 into this symbol at the heart of the American Dream.

United Airlines Flight 93 was en route to San Francisco from Newark, N.J., when the hijackers took over, apparently planning to crash the plane into the White House or the Capitol. Conversations from the plane's final minutes indicate the passengers had some idea of what was happening to them and, on the words "Let's roll," stormed the cockpit in an effort to wrest control shortly before the crash.

Not much has been said in the mainstream media about LeRoy W. Homer Jr.

At an early age, LeRoy W. Homer Jr knew that he wanted to be a pilot. As a child, LeRoy assembled model airplanes, collected aviation memorabilia and read books on aviation. LeRoy was 15 years old when he started flight instruction in the Cessna 152. Working part-time jobs after school to pay for flying lessons, he completed his first solo at 16 years old, and obtained his private pilot's certificate in 1983.

In the fall of 1983, LeRoy entered the Air Force Academy, and graduated with the Class of 1987, 31st Squadron. After completing pilot training in 1988, he was assigned to McGuire AFB in New Jersey, flying the C-141B Starlifter. While on active duty, LeRoy served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and later supported operations in Somalia. He received many commendations, awards and medals during his military career. In 1993, he was named the 21st Air Force Aircrew Instructor of the Year. LeRoy achieved the rank of Captain before his honorable discharge from active duty in 1995.

LeRoy continued his military career as a reservist, initially as an instructor pilot with the 356th Airlift Squadron at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, then subsequently as an Academy Liaison Officer, recruiting potential candidates for both the Air Force Academy and the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps. During his time with the Reserves, he achieved the rank of Major.

LeRoy continued his flying career by joining United Airlines in May 1995. His first assignment was Second Officer on the B727. He then upgraded to First Officer on the B757/767 in 1996, where he remained until September 11, 2001.

On September 11, 2001, LeRoy was flying with Captain Jason Dahl on United Flight 93. Based on information from several sources that day, we know LeRoy and Jason were the first to fight against the terrorist threat to the airplane. LeRoy has received many awards and citations posthumously, for his actions on Flight 93, including the Congress Of Racial Equality - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - Drum Major for Justice Award and the Westchester County Trailblazer Award.

LeRoy was able to accomplish much in his short life. He was able to do so because of the support of his family and friends, and the encouragement of his teachers and mentors. We hope that LeRoy's life will continue to be an inspiration to those who also share the dream of flying.

LeRoy married Melodie Thorpe on May 24, 1998 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. From that union, their daughter Laurel Nicole was born October 25, 2000.

LeRoy was known for his kind, caring disposition. He was the type of person that truly listened when you spoke. He was an exceptional individual with a wonderful sense of humor.

CAPT LeRoy Homer, United Airlines Flt. 93 on 9/11/01.

9/11 had a huge impact on United States foreign policy, on the way the Western world views Islam and on the Islamic world.

Since the crash, a group of volunteers known now as the Flight 93 ambassadors point visitors to the crash site on a previously barren wind swept field in Pennsylvania and describe what happened aboard the plane on Sept. 11, 2001. Some months they guide more than 25,000 visitors.

On that terrible day in 2001, it didn't take first responders long to realize there would be no survivors. Combing the site, all they could find at first were small pieces of aircraft — and bits of a United Airlines in-flight magazine.

"It was a pretty scary time," says a former assistant fire chief, Rick King, whose truck was the first to arrive. "I just remember driving down the road, wondering what we were about to see."

Searchers recovered only about 8 percent of the potential human remains but were able to identify everyone from the fragments they did find, said Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller.

"Most of the material was vaporized," he says.

2012-01-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

Journalist Sues Obama in New York District Court to Stop Indefinite Detention of American Citizens.

Here is a story you will not find in the mainstream media. You will not read it in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, or hear about it on CNN, MSNBC, or anywhere else.

Less than a month after the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was signed into law, President Barack Obama faces a lawsuit because of its highly controversial provisions regarding the detention of suspected terrorists.

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint against Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on behalf of journalist Chris Hedges. The complaint states that the law violates the First and Fifth Amendments.

The $662 billion defense spending bill contained a controversial section that required terrorism suspects to be detained by the military without trial, regardless of where they were captured.

Despite language in the law that states it does not affect existing authorities relating to the detention of U.S. citizens or others captured within the U.S., Hedges claims that it still allows the government to detain Americans indefinitely without trial.

“I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge,” Hedges explains. “I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have ‘disappeared’ into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.”

While signing the bill, Obama issued a signing statement in which he pledged that the new laws would not violate Americans’ constitutional rights. But human rights advocates said that did not prevent future administrations from abusing the law.

The complaint alleges that Hedges could fall within the scope of the law. As part of his job as a journalist, he has direct communications with persons who are likely to be deemed engaged in hostilities with the United States. The detention provisions cover anyone who has “substantially supported” or “directly supported” “al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

Hedges says that the controversial bill passed “because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

This will render null and void the Writ of Habeas Corpus, that is, Latin for "you have the body" Prisoners often seek release by filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody. A habeas corpus petition is a petition filed with a court by a person who objects to his own or another's detention or imprisonment. The petition must show that the court ordering the detention or imprisonment made a legal or factual error. Habeas corpus petitions are usually filed by persons serving prison sentences. In family law, a parent who has been denied custody of his child by a trial court may file a habeas corpus petition. Also, a party may file a habeas corpus petition if a judge declares her in contempt of court and jails or threatens to jail her.

In Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164, 1166 (9th Cir. 1991), cert. denied, 112 S.Ct. 1778 (1992), the court observed that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.' Harris v. Nelson, 394 U.S. 286, 290-91 (1969). " Therefore, the writ must be "administered with the initiative and flexibility essential to insure that miscarriages of justice within its reach are surfaced and corrected." Harris, 394 U.S. at 291.

The writ of habeas corpus serves as an important check on the manner in which state courts pay respect to federal constitutional rights. The writ is "the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action." Harris v. Nelson, 394 U.S. 286, 290-91 (1969). Because the habeas process delays the finality of a criminal case, however, the Supreme Court in recent years has attempted to police the writ to ensure that the costs of the process do not exceed its manifest benefits. In McCleskey the Court raised barriers against successive and abusive petitions. The Court raised these barriers based on significant concerns about delay, cost, prejudice to the prosecution, frustration of the sovereign power of the States, and the "heavy burden" federal collateral litigation places on "scarce federal judicial resources," a burden that "threatens the capacity of the system to resolve primary disputes." McCleskey, 499 U.S. at 467.

2012-01-15T19:41:00.001-08:00

Cadet Used Honor Code To Obtain Sexual Favors.
Cadet Robert M. Evenson Jr. is alleged to have forcibly raped a female cadet in the spring of 2010. He's also charged with breaking cadet regulations by having an ongoing relationship with a female freshman. He also is suspected of abusing his power position as a "cadet non-commissioned officer for honor cases" to extract sexual favors from a female fellow cadet. This is serious. He was charged with enforcing the Honor Code. He may have used it to supply gris for his mill. As one of the cadets entrusted with enforcing the Academy's Honor Code, he would have been in a very coveted position. He was expected to punish those who lie, cheat, steal or tolerate others who do. Those who violate the Honor Code face a maximum punishment of expulsion from the Academy. Allegations of corruption in the Honor Code enforcement system will likely send shock-waves through the Cadet Corps and the Academy alumni. The Honor Code is the very touchstone of the Academy's culture.

Who will watch the watchers? This exploitation of a power position was inevitable. It is as impossible to avoid detection indefinitely as it is to plans your own surprise birthday. This is probably not the first time this cadet has done this. It appears that he had momentum; that is, forward motion fueled by a series of wins.

Just what is the Honor Code. each of our military academies has an Honor Code or an Honor Concept. How do they differ? Read all about it in my book CONDUCT UNBECOMING an Officer and Lady. Read it for free in Kindle format at

https://www.amazon.com/author/cgachall.blogspot.com

The Coast Guard Academy Cadet Handbook (2010) tells the new cadet recruit that when you take the oath of office as a Cadet in the United States Coast Guard you begin your development as a commissioned officer in the Armed Forces of the United States. You will be expected to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to selflessly serve the American people.

In the Honor Concept there exists a higher standard of conduct that can neither be delineated by laws nor defined by regulations. It is the concept of Honor. Because Coast Guard cadets are called to a life of public service, and desire to attain that special trust and confidence which is placed in our nation’s commissioned officers, their actions must be straightforward and always above reproach. As future law enforcement officers, each cadet’s word and signature must be regarded as verification of the truth. The Coast Guard Academy’s Honor Concept is exemplified by a person who will neither lie, cheat, steal, nor attempt to deceive. It is epitomized by an individual who places loyalty to duty above loyalty to personal friendship or to selfish desire. While the Coast Guard Academy’s Honor Concept differs from a code, in that failure to report an honor offense is not itself an honor violation, cadets are required to report all activity that does not incriminate themselves. Moreover, the condoning of an honor violation is a Class I offense under the Cadet Regulations. Dis-enrollment is a very possible outcome. The Corps of Cadets are stewards of their Honor Concept.

At the center of their new world is adherence to a Concept or Cadet Honor Code to which they swear: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” Their whole new world is shaped around these principles. This initially shapeless reality begins to form into principles of rigid honesty, loyalty to their fellow cadets, and respect for their classmates and all with whom they associate.

What is conduct unbecoming an officer and a lady? Does it violate the Honor Concept? Does conduct that violates the UCMJ constitute a higher standard than the Honor Concept? Times are changing so rapidly, one wonders if cadets and officers of today can be held to the same standards of conduct that were intended by the drafters of the UCMJ and the MCM promulgated in 1951? Not everyone can be expected to meet ideal moral standards, but how far can the standards of behavior of cadets and officers fall below contemporary community standards without seriously compromising their standing as officers and ladies? Have the changes in ethics and values of American society been reflected in the military?

Both the United States Military Academy and the United States Air Force Academy have adopted a Cadet Honor Code as a formalized statement of the minimum standard of ethics expected of cadets. Other military schools have similar codes with their own methods of administration. The United States Naval Academy, like the Coast Guard Academy, has a related standard, known as the Honor Concept.

The Cadet Honor Code at the Air Force Academy, like that at West Point, is the cornerstone of a cadet's professional training and development — the minimum standard of ethical conduct that cadets expect of themselves and their fellow cadets. Air Force's honor code was developed and adopted by the Class of 1959, the first class to graduate from the Academy, and has been handed down to every subsequent class. The code adopted was based largely on West Point's Honor Code, but was modified slightly to its current wording:

We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.

In 1984, the Cadet Wing voted to add an "Honor Oath," which was to be taken by all cadets. The oath is administered to fourth class cadets (freshmen) when they are formally accepted into the Wing at the conclusion of Basic Cadet Training. The oath remains unchanged since its adoption in 1984, and consists of a statement of the code, followed by a resolution to live honorably:

We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.

Furthermore, I resolve to do my duty and to live honorably, so help me God.

Cadets are considered the "guardians and stewards" of the Code. Cadet honor representatives throughout the Wing oversee the honor system by conducting education classes and investigating possible honor incidents. Cadets throughout the Wing are expected to sit on Honor Boards as juries that determine whether their fellow cadets violated the code. Cadets also recommend sanctions for violations. Although the presumed sanction for a violation is di-senrollment, mitigating factors may result in the violator being placed in a probationary status for some period of time. This "honor probation" is usually only reserved for cadets in their first two years at the Academy. (Cadet Honor Code, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

https://www.amazon.com/author/cgachall.blogspot.com

2012-01-11T08:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.amazon.com/CONDUCT-UNBECOMING-Officer-Lady-ebook/dp/B006VPAADK/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_2

To start the New Year with a bang, commanders at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on 5 January 2012 charged three Air Force Academy cadets with sexual assault in cases that occurred over the past 15 months.

The cases involve acts allegedly committed at the Academy, and involve civilian women as well as female cadets.

In November 2011, Cadet Stephan H. Claxton is alleged to have unzipped the fly of a female cadet while she was "substantially incapacitated" -- a phrase the military has used in the past to describe intoxication.

Cadet Claxton faces assault and attempted rape charges, including an allegation that he forcibly kissed one cadet and assaulted another. He is also charged concerning an incident in March 2011, where he is accused of forcing a fellow cadet to touch his genitals and indulge in underage drinking.

Cadet Kyle A. Cressy, a graduating senior and a member of the soccer team, is charged having sex with a woman at the academy who was "substantially incapacitated." It's unclear from the charge sheet whether the alleged victim was a civilian or a female cadet.

Cadet Robert M. Evenson Jr. is alleged to have forcibly raped a female cadet in the spring of 2010. He's also charged with breaking cadet regulations by having an ongoing relationship with a female freshman. He also is suspected of abusing his power position as a "cadet non-commissioned officer for honor cases" to extract sexual favors from a female fellow cadet. This is serious. He was charged with enforcing the Honor Code. he may have used it to supply gris for his mill. As one of the cadets entrusted with enforcing the Academy's Honor Code, he would have been in a very coveted position. He was expected to punish those who lie, cheat, steal or tolerate others who do. Those who violate the Honor Code face a maximum punishment of expulsion from the Academy. Allegations of corruption in the Honor Code enforcement system will likely send shockwaves through the Cadet Corps and the Academy alumni. The Honor Code is the very touchstone of the Academy's culture.

These charges come to light a week after the Pentagon reported a spike in the number of sexual assaults at the air Force Academy. There were 33 reported incidents in the 2010-2011 academic year. This is a four-fold increase in a two year span.

There are about 4,000 cadets at the Air Force Academy. A senior academy spokesman said these charges don't appear to mark a return of the level of incidents of sexual assault of 2003. In 2003 the Academy and the nation were rocked when dozens of female cadets reported incidents of alleged sexual assaults. Many of those cases were mishandled or ignored.

Several senior officers at the Academy were fired in the wake of the 2003 scandal. This resulted in congressional scrutiny to the issue of sexual assaults at all the nation's military academies. There were courts-martial at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Three were major reforms at those institutions.

The Coast Guard Academy court-martial of Cadet Webster Smith marked the first time in history that a cadet at the Coast Guard Academy was given court-martial. Some Coast Guard Academy graduates accused the Coast Guard of racial discrimination because the accused, Cadet Webster Smith, was African American and all of the accusers were white females. One of them was his girl friend who had become pregnant, and had an abortion more than six months before the Coast Guard decided to charge Cadet Smith with rape.

In the meantime it was learned that about 11 other cases of confessed rape had been resolved without resort to a court-martial. All of the other cadets were allowed to resign quietly and slip into darkness. All the other cadets were white. This is part of the reason that there were claims of bias and inappropriate command influence in the prosecution of Webster Smith.

The conviction was appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court. It is interesting to note that there were several 'Friend of the Court' or 'amicus briefs' filed with the Supreme Court by senior military lawyers from other branches of the armed forces in favor of the reversal of the Webster Smith conviction. It set a very bad precedent and there were irregularities in the prosecution and the appellate review of the conviction. The case was thoroughly critiqued in a book available on Amazon.com. (See http://www.amazon.com/CONDUCT-UNBECOMING-Officer-Lady-ebook/dp/B006VPAADK/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_2)

The Pentagon in a December 2011 report to Congress praised the Air Force Academy's efforts to curb sexual assault in the ranks and gave the school high marks for its programs to encourage sexual assault reporting.

"[The academy] demonstrated commendable practices that should be considered for replication by other military service academies," the Defense Department wrote in the report. The Coast Guard Academy had already implemented a new procedure for reporting and investigating sexual assaults in the wake of the Webster Smith case.

If any of these cadets get convicted, it would mark a reversal of fortunes for air Force prosecutors. Since the 2003 scandal, the academy has prosecuted a string of rape cases against cadets. But none of those cases has resulted in a conviction. Unlike the Coast Guard Academy, where one prosecution in 2006 resulted in one conviction and six months in jail for a graduating senior. (http://www.amazon.com/CONDUCT-UNBECOMING-Officer-Lady-ebook/dp/B006VPAADK/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_2)

Recent rape trials at the Air Force Academy have almost always centered on the issue of 'consent'. The defendant always used as a defense that the alleged victim gave her consent. He said she asked for sex. The cases were also marked by a lack of forensic evidence that could help sort out the conflicting claims. One can never be sure what a jury will decide in a case of 'he-said, she-said'.

2011-10-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

Gaddafi Is now A Martyr.
Gaddafi died at the hands of an angry mob aided by a French air strike. It was a shameful spectacle. There is no law and no order in Libya. Shame on the NTC. It was a lynch mob. Gaddafi was captured alive. He deserved a trial. Such barbarism is ample evidence of how far man has progressed in his attempt to civilize himself. God help us.

Gaddafi was trying to flee the city in a convoy of cars when they came under attack from NATO jets. The French claimed responsibility for the airstrike. Charred remains of 15 pickup trucks lay burned out on a roadside where Gaddafi's convoy had attempted to punch through NTC lines. Inside the ruined vehicles sat the charred skeletons.

Unlike Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who was hanged, Gaddafi died on his feet, standing up and fighting back.

"While he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him," a senior source in the NTC told Reuters news agency. "He might have been resisting."

Officials said Gaddafi's son Mo'tassim, also seen bleeding but alive, had also died. Another son, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was variously reported to be surrounded, captured or killed as conflicting accounts of the day's events crackled around networks of NTC fighters rejoicing in Sirte.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, spearheaded the Franco-British move in NATO to back the revolt against Gaddafi.

Shortly before dawn prayers on Thursday, Gaddafi, surrounded by a few dozen loyal bodyguards and accompanied by the head of his now non-existent army Abu Bakr Younis Jabr, broke out of the two-month siege of Sirte and made a break for the west.

But they did not get far.

NATO said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte about 8:30 a.m. (2:30 a.m. ET), striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not confirm that Gaddafi had been a passenger. France later said its jets had halted the convoy, which was comprised of some 80 vehicles.

By averting a possible dispute in Libya and internationally about where to try him, and denying him a final platform for his trademark lengthy speeches, the summary killing on a desert road is very troubling and unworthy of great powers.

"Gaddafi is now a martyr and thus can become the rallying point for irredentist or tribal violence -- perhaps not in the immediate future but in the medium-to-long term," said George Joffe, a north Africa expert at Cambridge University.

"The fact that NATO can be blamed for his death is worrying, in terms of regional support, and may undermine the legitimacy of the National Transitional Council."

At the end his so-called friends and allies of convenience deserted him, like Jesus' disciples and friends before his crucifixion.

The death of Gaddafi is a setback to campaigners seeking the full truth about the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie in Scotland of Pan Am flight 103 which claimed 270 lives, mainly Americans, and for which one of Gaddafi's agents was convicted.

Gaddafi loved his green stick.

In the end all of his friends deserted him. US President Barack Obama (R) and Libyan Leader Moamer Kadhafi shake hands during the Group of Eight (G8) summit in L'Aquila, central Italy, on July 9, 2009.

Group of Eight leaders grappled at a summit in Italy with reining in unprecedented government support for their economies as divergences emerged over whether their economies were ready. AFP PHOTO / STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images) AFP/Getty Images

Gaddafi at the G8-SUMMIT was with them but not of them.

2011-10-04T15:25:00.001-07:00

CONDUCT UNBECOMING an Officer and Lady
If the USA is one big book club then the American Corner and the Steverson Collection Book Club must have been hoping that this would be the week that everyone was talking about "CONDUCT UNBECOMING an Officer and Lady", Judge London Steverson's most recent revelation concerning the trial and conviction of the first Coast Guard Academy cadet in the history of this small military academy in New London, CT..(www.judgelondonsteverson.com)

This case really made news and generated a lot of changes in the way sexual assaults are reported and investigated in the military academies. Read in full, this book is a new American Tragedy. It has the virtues and limitations of Theodore Dreiser's original American Tragedy: contemporary, still unfolding history, shadows of power, teenage binge drinking, inter-racial sexual encounters of the worst kind, and immorality at the highest levels of the military. That means an all knowing, seemingly eyewitness, mind-reading author; an unbelievable dialogue of incrimination and recrimination, back and forth he-said, she-said. One is left with the unmistakable feeling that someone must be telling the truth, but who?

If the male cadet-accused is, then the female cadet-accuser is a woman of easy virtue times two. Also, she would have to be a pathological liar.

If the female cadet-accuser is telling the truth, then the accused male cadet is a Jim Dandy, smooth, athletic, lady's man, who finally gets hoisted on his own petard.

This book is non-fiction, and it is based on a true story. It is an analysis of the latest bomb to come out of the annals of inter-class, inter-racial, misconduct at the Coast Guard Academy.

Analysis, background, and exposition necessarily take a back seat to exaggeration. There is no need to inflate the facts; this truth is more fascinating than fiction.

After showing that the accused is not the sexual predator that he was alleged to have been by senior officials, the book demonstrates how the justice system was used to pervert justice in a case of few complicated facts. This case actually went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

In addition to exposing the trial for what it was; that is to say, a kangaroo court; the author actually paints a detailed and accurate description of the real Coast Guard Academy sexual predator.

https://www.amazon.com/author/cgachall.blogspot.com

2011-10-02T17:04:00.001-07:00

http://www.amazon.com/socialNsecurity-Confessions-Social-Security-Judge/dp/1449569757

Steverson Collection Book Club

The American Corner in Veszprém provides up-to-date, accurate, and tailor-made information on issues related to the U.S. Citizens of the region are welcome to visit the Corner to gain information about the the American educational system, arts, sciences, and economy. In addition to that, our aim is to create links and foster communication between Hungary and the U.S. The Corner focuses mainly on educational, cultural and business issues connecting the two nations. Besides providing basic services, we organize conferences, meetings, exhibitions, and performances.

Detailed Info Website:http://www.americancorner.hu
Company Overview:The American Corners (AC) program is a United States Department of State-sponsored initiative inaugurated worldwide more than 10 years ago.
American Corner Debrecen is a cultural and information center supported by the Embassy of the United States, the City Council of Debrecen and the University of Debrecen.
Mission:The basic function of the American Corner is to make information about the United States available by providing access to current and reliable information about the U. S. via book, video, and DVD collections, the Internet, and through a wide range of local programs.
We hope to bring the American culture closer to the Hungarian people and therefore foster international cooperation.
Products:Knowledge, cheerfulness, friendship... ALL FOR FREE :)

After the Opening Ceremony of the Steverson Collection on 23 April, 2009 the
American Corner Veszprem was excited to announce the start of the
Steverson Collection Book Club. The Club's aim is to give the reading public a chance to get
acquainted with the vast collection of books in the generous donation from Judge London
Steverson and his family. This Book Club is be run by booklovers, for booklovers.
The members are at the heart of all the club does.

Variety is at the heart of our Club. The Steverson Collection contains thousands of used and rare English language books on a variety of subjects of interest; such as, History, Humor, Satire, Myths & Legends, Philosophy, Poetry, Shakespeare, Religion, Reference,
Travel & Leisure, Exploration (The Silk Road, The Spice Route, The
Northwest Passage, Antarctica, The North Pole, and more..)

Steverson Collection Book Club meets every Tuesday in the American Corner.
Do you like reading? Join the unique Steverson Collection Book Club. Meet new friends. Memberhip is free, the language English. win a valuable English language book every month. Date and time: 16:30-17:30, September 27, 2011. Venue: American Corner, Eötvös Károly County Library and Cultural Institute, Veszprém, Komakút tér 3.

Join The Steverson Collection Book Club and meet new friends from 16:30-17:30 every Tuesday at the American Corner. Do you like reading? Are you interested in English language books? Memberhip is free, the language of the program is English. Date: August 30, 2011. Venue: American Corner, Eötvös Károly County Library and Cultural Institute, Veszprém, Komakút tér 3.

(Hungarian)
(Részletek) Steverson gyűjtemény könyvklub (Steverson Collection Book Club)
Minden kedden 16:30-17:30-ig az Amerikai Kuckóban.

Szeretsz olvasni? Érdekelnek az angol nyelvű könyvek? Csatlakozz az
egyedülálló Steverson-gyűjtemény könyvklubjához, és ismerkedj meg új
könyvekkel és új barátokkal! A részvétel ingyenes, a program nyelve
angol.

Időpont: 2011. Augusztus 30. 16:30-17:30.
Helyszín: Amerikai Kuckó, Eötvös Károly Megyei

2011-09-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia deleted page Re: London Steverson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

London Eugene Livingston Steverson (born March 13, 1947) was one of the first two African Americans to graduate from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1968. Later, as chief of the newly formed Minority Recruiting Section of the United States Coast Guard (USCG), he was charged with desegregating the Coast Guard Academy by recruiting minority candidates. He retired from the Coast Guard in 1988 and in 1990 was appointed to the bench as a Federal Administrative Law Judge with the Office of Hearings and Appeals, Social Security Administration.
Contents

1 Early life and education
2 USCG Assignments
3 USCG Minority Recruiting
4 Law
5 Awards
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

Early life and education

Steverson was born and raised in Millington, Tennessee, the oldest of three children of Jerome and Ruby Steverson. At the age of 5 he was enrolled in the E. A. Harrold elementary school in a segregated school system. He later attended the all black Woodstock High School in Memphis, Tennessee, graduating valedictorian.

A Presidential Executive Order issued by President Truman had desegregated the armed forces in 1948,[1] but the service academies were lagging in officer recruiting. President Kennedy specifically challenged the United States Coast Guard Academy to tender appointments to Black high school students. London Steverson was one of the Black student to be offered such an appointment, and when he accepted the opportunity to be part of the class of 1968, he became the second African American to enter the previously all-white military academy. On June 4, 1968 Steverson graduated from the Coast Guard Academy with a BS degree in Engineering and a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Coast Guard.

In 1974, while still a member of the Coast Guard, Steverson entered The National Law Center of The George Washington University and graduated in 1977 with a Juris Doctor of Laws Degree.
USCG Assignments

Steverson's first duty assignment out of the Academy was in Antarctic research logistical support. In July 1968 he reported aboard the Coast Guard Cutter (CGC) Glacier [2] (WAGB-4), an icebreaker operating under the control of the U.S. Navy, and served as a deck watch officer and head of the Marine Science Department. He traveled to Antarctica during two patrols from July 1968 to August 1969, supporting the research operations of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Research Project in and around McMurdo Station. During the 1969 patrol the CGC Glacier responded to an international distress call from the Argentine icebreaker General SanMartin, which they freed.

He received another military assignment from 1970 to 1972 in Juneau, Alaska as a Search and Rescue Officer. Before being certified as an Operations Duty Officer, it was necessary to become thoroughly familiar with the geography and topography of the Alaskan remote sites. Along with his office mate, Ltjg Herbert Claiborne "Bertie" Pell, the son of Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, Steverson was sent on a familiarization tour of Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force bases. The bases visited were Base Kodiak, Base Adak Island, and Attu Island, in the Aleutian Islands.[3]

Steverson was the Duty Officer on September 4, 1971 when an emergency call was received that an Alaskan Airlines Boeing 727 airline passenger plane was overdue at Juneau airport. This was a Saturday and the weather was foggy with drizzling rain. Visibility was less than one-quarter mile. The 727 was en route to Seattle, Washington from Anchorage, Alaska with a scheduled stop in Juneau. There were 109 people on board and there were no survivors. Steverson received the initial alert message and began the coordination of the search and rescue effort. In a matter of hours the wreckage from the plane, with no survivors, was located on the side of a mountain about five miles from the airport. For several weeks the body parts were collected and reassembled in a staging area in the National Guard Armory only a few blocks from the Search and Rescue Center where Steverson first received the distress broadcast.[4]. Later a full investigation with the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the cause of the accident was equipment failure.[5]

Another noteworthy item is Steverson's involvement as an Operations Officer during the seizure of two Russian fishing vessels, the Kolevan and the Lamut for violating an international agreement prohibiting foreign vessels from fishing in United States territorial waters. The initial attempts at seizing the Russian vessels almost precipitated an international incident when the Russian vessels refused to proceed to a U. S. port, and instead sailed toward the Kamchatka Peninsula. Russian MIG fighter planes were scrambled, as well as American fighter planes from Elmendorf Air Force Base before the Russian vessels changed course and steamed back to Anchorage, where a U.S. Attorney was waiting to prosecute the vessels for the violations of fishing treaties.

Because of his icebreaker experience, Steverson was later made the Seventeenth District's first Ice Operations Officer. With the increased activity at Point Barrow and on the North Slope of Alaska brought on by the discovery of the vast oil reserves, more Coast Guard icebreakers were making patrols North of the Bering Sea, where icebreaking is necessary.

The Coast Guard did not have a separate Judge Advocate General's Corp (JAG). Coast Guard lawyers were called "legal specialists". These law specialists were line officers and could rotate out of the regular legal billets. Frequently these tours of duty out of specialty were in law related areas. Steverson served one such four year tour of duty as the Chief Marine Investigating Officer for the Marine Inspection Office in Battery Park, New York from 1982 to 1986. This job was similar to that of a city prosecutor. With a staff of ten investigating officers, he would investigate marine disasters for negligence and causes of action. Any marine personnel found to have violated a marine safety law would be charged and tried before a Coast Guard administrative law judge at the World Trade Center. In the case of a major marine disaster with multiple loss of life, a formal Board of Inquiry would be convened under the direction of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). These Inquiries often would result in promulgation of new marine safety regulations under Title 46 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). One such incident was the Case of The Joan LaRie III, a charter fishing vessel that sank of the coast of New Jersey on October 24, 1982. [6][7][8]
USCG Minority Recruiting
Lt. Steverson with the 20 new Black cadets in the Class of 1978, sworn in July 1974 on the steps of Chase Hall.

In July 1972 Steverson was reassigned from Alaska to Washington, D.C. to become the Chief of the newly formed Minority Recruiting Section of the USCG, and was charged with working toward desegregating the nearly all-white USCG, starting with the United States Coast Guard Academy.

From 1876 until 1962 the Academy had not admitted any African-American cadets. One graduated in 1966, two graduated in 1968 (including Steverson) and one graduated in 1970. After that none were admitted until Steverson was placed in charge of the national recruiting effort. As the second minority cadet to enter and graduate from this institution, Steverson had obvious expertise in this endeavor.

He traveled the country looking for qualified minority high school students who could compete for admission. Since the Coast Guard Academy is the only one of the United States military academies that does not require a Congressional appointment, and admission is strictly on the basis of the Scholastic Aptitude Test with additional consideration of extra-curricular involvement, minority applicants stood a better chance of being admitted to the Coast Guard Academy than to Annapolis, West Point or the Air Force Academy.

His efforts were rewarded in 1973 when 28 Black cadets were sworn into the Class of 1977, and again in 1974 when 20 Black cadets were admitted as part of the Class of 1978. It was from these cadets that the Coast Guard's first African-American officers of flag rank were to come in the 1990s; officers such as Admiral Joseph Jones, Admiral Errol Brown and Admiral Manson K. Brown.

While Lieutenant Steverson was charged first and foremost with recruiting cadets for the Academy (because that is where the bulk of the career officers would come from), he was also requested to find minority college graduates who were willing receive direct commissions as lawyers and as aviators. These officers were already college graduates and had no need to attend the four year Academy, instead received a three month orientation at the Coast Guard Officer Training Center. He recruited several people from the Vanderbilt University Law School.

After serving two years in this position, he was replaced by the Academy's first graduate from Guam, Juan Tudela Salas.[9]
Law

He next worked as a Law Specialist in the 12th Coast Guard District Office, San Francisco, California and as an Assistant U. S. Attorney for the collection of Civil Penalties under the Federal Boating Safety Act from 1979 to 1982. An Assistant District Legal Officer, he was required to defend as well as prosecute military members who had been charged with violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Occasionally he was asked to represent other officers in administrative actions involving sexual harassment and discrimination. One such case was the Case of Christine D. Balboni against the Department of Transportation and the United States Coast Guard (DOT Case No. 82-177). Ensign Balboni was one of the first female graduates of the Coast Guard Academy. She graduated in the Class of 1981 and was assigned to the Coast Guard Cutter RUSH, a high endurance law enforcement vessel stationed in Alameda, California. She filed a formal complaint of sexual harassment against three senior officers on board the RUSH. She alleged that false special fitness reports had been written concerning her and that the captain of the ship had requested her immediate transfer off the ship long before her normal rotation date. After no other lawyer would take her case, Commander Ronald Mathews, Chief of The 12th District Legal Office, assigned Lieutenant Commander Steverson to represent Ensign Balboni in a formal departmental administrative hearing before a federal administrative law judge. The charges made by Ensign Balboni were determined to be valid. The relief granted was to have the false special fitness reports removed from her service record and destroyed. She was promoted to the next higher rank. Her career was saved. No disciplinary action was taken against the offending officers.[10][11]

He became the Chief of the Investigating Division at the Marine Inspection Office New York City. In 1986 he was detailed to the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System under the Office of Vice President at the time, George H. W. Bush.

When he retired in June 1988 he became the first African-American Coast Guard Academy graduate to retire as a regular line office from the service, and held the rank of Lieutenant-Commander during his last 10 years of service.

He retired to Dumont, New Jersey and practiced law in New York, with a focus on family law and defending Coast Guardsmen accused of federal crimes. He is a member of the New York State, New York City, and Tennessee Bar Associations.

In July 1990 he was appointed a federal administrative law judge by President George W. Bush. He was assigned to the Ninth Region of the Social Security Office of Hearings and Appeals in California. [12]

In April 2009 he retired from his United States Administrative Law Judge Appointment. He devoted himself to philanthropic endeavors. The Steverson Collection at www.ekmk.hu and the Steverson Collection Book Club were his major attempts to improve literacy and to spread American culture in the non-English speaking countries of Europe.
Awards

The Cultural Diplomacy Award was given to Judge Steverson in April 2009 by the United States Ambassador to Hungary for helping create "a foundation of trust" with the people, which can be built on to reach political, economic, and military agreements; and that combats the notion that Americans are shallow, violent, and godless. He helped to affirm that Americans have such values as family, faith, and the desire for education in common with others; he helped to create a relationship with the people, which will endure beyond changes in government; he helped to reach influential members of the society, who could not be reached through traditional diplomatic functions; and, he donated a large collection of new, used, and rare English books to the American Corners of Hungary.

The State Department Cultural Diplomacy Award is designed to honor distinguished representatives of American culture whose efforts and artistry advance America's goals of mutual understanding and the deepening of friendship between the United States and others.

Since his appointment by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 as federal administrative judge to the Ninth Region of the Social Security Office of Hearings and Appeals, Judge Steverson and family have resided in Downey City, CA, where he was president of the Downey Sister City Association for seven years, and an International Peace Ambassador.
See also

Black Cadets at the Coast Guard Academy

References

^ Truman Library - Executive Order 9981
^ http://www.laesser.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=90&Itemid=38
^ Attu Homepage
^ DCA72AZ003
^ Aviation Disasters Crashes
^ http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-m/moa/boards/joanlerie.pdf
^ http://www.webandwire.com/coast%20guard%20casualties.htm
^ Missing Body Is Found In Jersey Boat Sinking - New York Times
^ http://www.offisland.com/armedsalas.html Info about Juan Tudela Salas
^ Transitions - The Mason Spirit - George Mason University
^ Search Results - THOMAS (Library of Congress)
^ http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7862/2758/320/AljOmaha35630520.jpg

External links

Integration of the Armed Forces 1940-1965, chapter 20 Limited Response to Discrimination - includes info about President John F. Kennedy's personal involvement with the first attempts to desegregate the USCG Academy, which was a direct cause of London Steverson's admission into the Academy.
USCG history page - See of this page starting with caption for picture of the Lamut (about 2/3 the way down the page).
Photo of the judge in robes on the bench
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7862/2758/1600/JudgePortraitDSC03584.jpg
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7862/2758/320/AljOmaha35630520.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~uscgacademy/london.html

Categories: 1947 births | George Washington University alumni | Living people | United States Coast Guard Academy alumni

Related links
Up to date as of November 16, 2009
[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Photo of the judge in robes on the bench

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Integration of the Armed Forces 1940-1965, chapter 20 - CHAPTER 20: Limited Response to Discrimination

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Truman Library - Executive Order 9981

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Info about Juan Tudela Salas - Salas - offisland.com

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Attu Homepage

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] DCA72AZ003

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Aviation Disaters Crashes

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Homeport: Investigations

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] MISSING BODY IS FOUND IN JERSEY BOAT SINKING - New York Times

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Search Results - THOMAS (Library of Congress)

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Transitions - The Mason Spirit -- George Mason University

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Comcast

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 100% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] Cite/Cite.php - Meta

[This page is marked authoritative because it has been included for 75% of the life of the Wikipedia article.] link title - Example Web Page

Related topics
Up to date as of August 19, 2010

United States Coast Guard
United States Naval Academy
United States Military Academy
United States Navy
Black Cadets at the Coast Guard Academy
United States Air Force Academy

2011-06-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

Social Security Judges Under Fire.

Social Security Judges are under fire from Congress which recently discovered how much they are paying out in benefits. In a recent series of articles in the Wall Street Journal and other media, judges are being focused on for approving every disability case that comes before them. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303654804576347790598676096.html; http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704681904576319163605918524.html; http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/51934862-78/disability-security-social-judges.html.csp; http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/592475/wall_street_journal_tries_to_smear_west_virginia_judge_over_social_security_rulings?page=entire; http://www.huntingtonnews.net/4769; ). Some in Congress are wondering why we need to pay a judge $167,000.00 a year to rubber-stamp every case that comes before him. A lawyer at the GS-9 level making $40,000.00 a year or less could do the same and save millions of dollars a year. The Law of Averages says that even a trained chimpanzee would be right about half the time, and he would work for peanuts.
Americans seeking Social Security disability benefits will often appeal to one of 1,500 administrative law judges (ALJ) who help administer the program. In the first half of 2011, 27 ALJs awarded social security benefits 95% of the time because of pressure from Commissioner M. Astrue. Nationwide over 100 ALJs are approving 9 out of every 10 cases that come before them. The cases they fail to approve are likely to be approved by the Appeals Council, which works for the Commissioner. Senate and House Committees are investigating the issue. Approving all cases without even reviewing the file is called “paying down the backlog”. Judges are under pressure to move cases quickly in order to clear a backlog of 730,000 pending cases. The pressure comes directly from the Commissioner of Social Security. This is one of the things that I discuss in detail in the book “socialNsecurity”, available at http://judgelondonsteverson.com; and I put it in proper perspective. Having spent about 20 years observing the competing forces that produce a judge who reverses 100% of his cases, while another reverses less than 10%, I have a better handle on this issue than a reporter who writes a sensational article. Much of my insight and explanation of the competing forces is spelled out in my book “socialNsecurity, Confessions of a Social Security Judge”. Anyone looking for more historical and recent statistics on this subject along with an explanation of how the system works can find easy readable information in my book.

2011-04-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

Why Was Webster Smith court-martialed?

An American Tragedy, The Webster Smith Story Is An American Tragedy.

The Webster Smith Story is an American tragedy. It is not just the story of a Black Coast Guard Academy cadet; it is the story of an American family. It is the story of his mother, Belinda; and his father, Cleon; his wife, Lindsey and their daughter; and of his sister and brothers. It is the story of the friends of Webster Smith. They have all been harmed by the violence directed at their son, brother, husband, father and friend.

At the Coast Guard Academy, Webster Smith was a member of the Eclipse, Track Team, Football team, Regimental Staff, and a Swab summer Staff. He represented the Coast Guard in Washington DC concerning fitness and nutrition programs. He received numerous silver stars and never received a demerit prior the incident and investigation in 2005 that led to his court-martial.

To his classmates, teachers, and coaches Webster Smith appeared to be a magnetic, charming and gifted man, who had risen above his circumstances. Yet, in a moment, as if in the twinkling of an eye, a swift series of events diminished his popularity, vilified his name, and assailed his honor. His image was converted by senior Coast Guard officers from a popular athlete and nice guy to that of a sexual predator and public enemy number one at the Coast Guard Academy.

Webster Smith had dared to dream some big dreams. Like Alex Haley he had dared to believe that he could rise in the USCG to the highest level to which his talents and initiative could take him.

His parents were middle class African Americans. His father, Cleon Smith, was a graduate of the Coast Guard Academy in the Class of 1978 along with Vice Admiral Manson K. Brown.

His mother, Belinda Ingram Smith, believed in God and a good education. After attending college at WSSU for four years she went on to become the first Black female Crime Scene Investigator in the history of the Winston-Salem police Department.

This unbelievable turn about in what had been a Black success story is a singularly American tragedy.

That a cadet so deeply respected and loved by his coaches and classmates could evoke such an outpouring of hate and anger from the senior officers at the Coast Guard Academy is a Coast Guard tragedy and an American tragedy.

All of the female cadets involved with and associated with Webster Smith escaped clean without any consequences for their actions or their behavior. Mother Nature was the only one who exacted a penalty. Natural Law resulted in a pregnancy for his girlfriend. An abortion followed.

If women are equal, they should be treated as equal. Not a single woman was disciplined under the UCMJ or the cadet regulations. All of the female cadets involved in the Webster Smith case graduated and were commissioned as Coast Guard officers. Their testimony at the court-martial painted a picture of female cadets who were untrustworthy, arrogant, and certainly not ladies. Their conduct was unbecoming an officer and a lady. (Read more at www.judgelondonsteverson.com)

These women were witnesses at a public trial yet they were accorded the equivalent of rape shield protection. This was not a rape case. Not one of the women had been raped. There was testimony of consensual sex acts. Some of the consensual sex acts were unlawful because, among other things, they occurred in Chase Hall, or at Academy functions. How could unlawful consensual sex acts result in charges against only one of the participants? It takes two to tango.

Is it wrong for Black people to ask if there is a double standard? Would that amount to paranoia on the part of Black people? Or would that be considered playing the race card simply to inquire? Is it absurd to believe that anything more than pure chance resulted in the court-martial of Webster Smith? The fact that he was court-martialed speaks to a social reality that African-Americans are acutely aware of in America. Race is not a card to be dealt, but it determines whom the dealer is and who gets dealt a losing hand.

According to a 2008 General Accounting Office Report, from 2003 to 2006 there were NO sexual-harassment complaints at the Coast Guard Academy, but there were 12 incidents of sexual assault reported to the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS), with one incident in 2003, one in 2004, “NONE” in 2005 and 10 in 2006. It is hard to conceive of the facts relied upon by, Captain Douglas Wisniewski, the Commandant Of Cadets when he asserted in 2005 that there was a climate of fear of sexual assault in Chase Hall.

The 10 incidents reported in 2006 would appear to have occurred after the Webster Smith court-martial. Webster Smith was removed from Chase Hall in 2005. Who was doing all of the sexual assaulting in 2006? Why were none of these people brought to justice? They could have been tried along with Webster Smith.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Webster Smith. The justices declined to hear the case without comment. The decision of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) became the final decision in the case.

Thirteen female cadets and 11 males at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (CGA) reported anonymously in an April 2008 survey that they experienced “unwanted sexual contact,” ranging from touching to forced sexual acts, during the 2007-08 school year.

More than three-quarters said that alcohol or drugs were involved and that the offender was a fellow cadet.
None of the women sought professional help and only 7 percent discussed the incident with authorities.

When Alexander Hamilton organized the Revenue Cutter Service in 1790 it was established in the Department of the Treasury. Later it became known as the Coast Guard. In 1966 it was placed in the Department of Transportation. Today it is the nucleus of the Department of Homeland Security. Webster Smith's case is currently being reviewed for clemency by the Secretary of the Department of Home Land Security, Janet Napolitano.

Webster Smith would have made an excellent military officer. It is Webster Smith and people like him that I want on the wall as our last line of defense for our American way of life protecting us from the great unwashed horde that is coming. Secretary Napolitano who do you want on that wall?
(Read more at www.judgelondonsteverson.com)

CONDUCT UNBECOMING an Officer and a Lady: A Case That Will Live In Infamy. The Conviction of Webster Smith. by Judge London Steverson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Webster Smith Story is an American tragedy. It is not just the story of a Black Coast Guard Academy cadet; it is the story of an American family. To his classmates, teachers, and coaches at the Coast Guard Academy Webster Smith appeared to be a magnetic, charming and gifted man, who had risen above his circumstances. Yet, in a moment, as if in the twinkling of an eye, a swift series of events diminished his popularity, vilified his name, and assailed his honor. His image was converted by senior Coast Guard officers from a popular athlete and nice guy to that of a sexual predator and public enemy number one at the Coast Guard Academy.The Webster Smith case was a litmus test for justice in America. Every once in a while a case comes along that puts our humanity as a people on trial. Everything that we profess to stand for as Americans was on trial. I am ashamed of our justice system. This was a tragedy and a travesty.

I wanted to know why Webster Smith was court-martialed? Now I know. This book is the full story.

http://cgreport.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/conduct-unbecoming-an-officer-and-a-lady-the-webster-smith-trial/#comment-27379

View all my reviews

2011-01-05T01:07:00.001-08:00

N-Word Removed From Mark Twain Classics.

MONTGOMERY, Ala.(AP) — Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in "Huck Finn" and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those "which people praise and don't read."

"It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers," Gribben said.

Yet Twain was particular about his words. His letter in 1888 about the right word and the almost right one was "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

The book isn't scheduled to be published until February, at a mere 7,500 copies, but Gribben has already received a flood of hateful e-mail accusing him of desecrating the novels. He said the e-mails prove the word makes people uncomfortable.

"Not one of them mentions the word. They dance around it," he said.

2010-12-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

Supreme Court Too Busy To Bother With Webster Smith's Case.

A final judgement has been entered in the Case of Cadet Webster Smith. He fought a good fight; he kept the faith; and, he finished the course. But, there is no crown of justification laid up for him in this world.

Perhaps in the World Tomorrow, the Righteous Judge will see the merits of his case.

Hard cases make bad law. In this case, the facts were not so hard to distinguish as the defendant was of the wrong persuasion.

Webster Smith will never again have to ask 'how is the cow?'. No need to explain that she walks; she talks; she's full of chalk; the lactile fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the Nth degree. He will never again have to concern himself with swab indoc. He will never be a company officer adviser, or the Commandant of Cadets.

A regrettable and avoidable chapter in Coast Guard history may be over.

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

No. 10-18
Title: Webster M. Smith, Petitioner
v.
United States

Docketed: June 30, 2010
Lower Ct: United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
Case Nos.: (08-0719)
Decision Date: March 29, 2010

~~~Date~~~ ~~~~~~~Proceedings and Orders~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jun 28 2010 Petition for a writ of certiorari filed. (Response due July 30, 2010)

Jul 30 2010 Brief amicus curiae of National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed.
Jul 30 2010 Brief amicus curiae of United States Army Defense Appellate Division filed.

Oct 28 2010 Brief of respondent United States in opposition filed.
Nov 5 2010 Reply of petitioner Webster M. Smith filed. TBP
Nov 8 2010 DISTRIBUTED for Conference of November 23, 2010.
Nov 29 2010 Petition DENIED.

The only cadet court-martialed in the 130-year history of the Coast Guard Academy has run out of options to appeal his conviction.

Cadet Webster Smith already served time behind bars, but continued to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

After more than four years, the Smith case is over. The former Coast Guard cadet hit a dead end when the U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear his final appeal.

Smith was acquitted of rape charges, but served five months in a military prison after being convicted of sodomy, extortion and other charges.

He was also kicked out of the Coast Guard Academy.

Smith has claimed in multiple appeals that his constitutional rights were violated at his trial.

He said he wasn't allowed to ask one of the female cadets who accused him of rape about her past, saying he wanted to show that the woman known as Cadet S.R., had a motive to lie about what happened with Smith.

He claimed their sexual encounter was consensual.

Since the nation's high court has declined to hear Smith's case, the final judgment comes from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the armed forces.

In March the court ruled that his conviction should stand, saying "further cross-examination of Cadet S.R. was not 'constitutionally required.'"

Many Supreme Court experts thought the high court might take Smith's case, but the justices declined the case without comment.

Congress is deadlocked; the President is weakened; and, the Supreme Court does not appear to be in a mood to settle conflicts of law between the Circuit Courts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, this may be a good time to legislate from the bench.

This case implicates a deep circuit conflict regarding
the standard of review that applies when a trial
judge’s restriction on the cross-examination of a prosecution
witness is challenged on appeal as a violation of
the Confrontation Clause. The Court of Appeals for the
Armed Forces (CAAF) held that the standard of
review is abuse of discretion rather than de novo. Applying
the former standard, the court rejected Webster Smith’s
Confrontation Clause claim by a vote of 3-2.

The Courts Of Appeals Are Deeply Divided
Over What Standard Of Review Applies To
Confrontation Clause Claims Like Webster Smith’s.
The CAAF employed abuse-of-discretion review in resolving
Smith’s Sixth Amendment challenge to the
military judge’s restriction on the defense’s crossexamination
of Shelly. That approach conflicts with the holdings of five circuits, which consider comparable Confrontation Clause claims de novo,
reserving abuse-of-discretion review for nonconstitutional
challenges. For example, the Seventh
Circuit has stated that “[o]rdinarily, a district court’s
evidentiary rulings are reviewed for abuse of discretion.
However, when the restriction [on crossexamination]
implicates the criminal defendant’s Sixth
Amendment right to confront witnesses against him, ...
the standard of review becomes de novo.”
The First, Fifth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits
have adopted the same approach.

Six other circuits, by contrast—the Second, Third,
Fourth, Sixth, Eleventh, and District of Columbia Circuits—
take the same approach that CAAF does, applying
abuse-of-discretion review even when a restriction
on the cross-examination of a prosecution witness is attacked
on constitutional grounds. The Sixth Circuit,
for example, stated in one case that “[defendant] argues
that his right to confrontation was violated when the
trial court ‘unfairly’ limited his cross-examination of [a]
government witness .… We review the district court’s
restriction on a defendant’s right to cross-examine witnesses
for abuse of discretion.”

In short, CAAF’s use of an abuse-of-discretion
standard in this case perpetuates a clear—and recognized—conflict in the circuits.

The Question Presented Was Recurring And
Important, And The Smith Case Was A Good Vehicle
For Deciding It.
The circuit conflict at issue warranted resolution
by the Supreme Court. The constitutionality of restrictions
on cross-examination arises frequently in criminal prosecutions, and in every part of the country. Those cases also show that the conflict over the standard for appellate review of such restrictions is established;
there is no benefit to be gained by giving the lower courts additional time to consider the issue. Moreover, the question presented was important, because the standard of review can determine the outcome of an appeal. The difference between a rule of deference and the duty to exercise independent review is much more than a mere matter of degree. In even moderately close cases, the standard of review may be dispositive of an appellate court’s decision. That is particularly true when one
standard is highly deferential: CAAF, for example, has stated that “the abuse of discretion standard is a strict one,” satisfied only when “[t]he challenged action [is] arbitrary, fanciful, clearly unreasonable, or clearly erroneous".

Also, disuniformity created by the conflict directly
affects a fundamental individual right. Some defendants
in criminal cases enjoy less protection of the critical
right to confront their accusers because of the fortuity
of where their trials were held,or, as to cases decided
by CAAF, because they have chosen to wear the nation’s uniform.

The Webster Smith case presented a good vehicle to resolve the circuit
conflict. Webster Smith’s standard-of-review argument was both pressed and passed upon in the court of appeals, rendering the issue suitable for review by certiorari. In addition, CAAF’s rejection of Smith’s argument may well have determined the ultimate outcome. Even applying highly deferential review, CAAF was narrowly divided as to the constitutionality
of the military judge’s ruling in this case. If even one of the three judges who deemed that ruling not to be an abuse of discretion were to conclude, upon reviewing without deference, that it was inconsistent
with the Sixth Amendment, Webster Smith would have prevailed.

Smith now lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughter. He's required to register as a sex offender there for the rest of his life.

Justice truly was not served in this case. What is happening in America?
What happened to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press? With the dumbing-down of the American educational system, most Americans now seem to know little and care less about their fundamental freedoms and civil liberties. Some believe that the police have a right to enter their homes without probable cause or a warrant. They do not believe that they have the right to "just say No".

In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave fundamental freedoms are being challenged as never before. Senators on Capitol Hill sound like a lynch mob calling for the head of the Wikileaks leader who published diplomatic cables on the internet. Many of the cables were little more than embarassing gossip. Yet, the administration that came into town riding the "transparency in government" horse are scrambling to keep its in-house chatter secret. We have not seen this much ado about release of tapes and documents since Richard Nixon and Alexander Butterfield let the cat out of the bag with the Watergate Tapes brew-ha-ha.

2010-11-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

It is open season on Black Congressmen.

The ethics Trial of Congressman Charles Rahgel began with an admonition from House ethics committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and went downhill from there.

Talk about setting a low bar.

Within minutes of its opening 15 November, the trial degenerated into exactly the level of dignity and decorum we have come to expect from our lawmakers.

Rangel immediately requested a postponement of the trial. Rangel until recently had sway over hundreds of billions of dollars as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Half an hour into the public hearing he had demanded for so long, Rangel announced that he was leaving.

"I object to the proceedings, and I, with all due respect, since I don't have counsel to advise me, I'm going to have to excuse myself from these proceedings," he told his eight colleagues, who wore expressions of surprise and amusement.

After Rangel departed, he treated reporters who chased him down the hall to more of his treatise on fairness and justice. The committee members huddled in private, then decided to proceed with the trial of Rangel in absentia, as if they were a Hague tribunal judging an at-large war criminal.

This was but the latest act in the ongoing farce known as congressional ethics. Rules are so flexible, and enforcement so lax, that even instances that look like outright influence-buying don't get prosecuted. And there's no sign that the situation will improve, as key figures make noises about abolishing the new Office of Congressional Ethics, a semi-independent body designed to make ethics investigations more transparent.

"I am being denied a right to have a lawyer," he informed the committee with righteous indignation.
"You may hire whoever you wish as a lawyer," the chairwoman told him. "That is up to you."

There is some truth to Rangel's complaint. His law firm, Zuckerman Spaeder, withdrew from the case after his trial date was set, and after Rangel had paid them at least $1.4 million.

Rangel, after a tough reelection campaign (and the loss of fundraising clout associated with his committee chairmanship), has little campaign money left to pay another lawyer, and House rules prevent him from accepting pro bono help. (Celebrated criminal lawyer Abbe Lowell, seated with Rangel's family in the hearing room Monday morning, was willing to take the case for a pittance.)

Rep. Rangel, once one of the most influential House members, was convicted on 16 November on 11 counts of breaking ethics rules and now faces punishment. The veteran New York lawmaker immediately denounced the verdict as unfair.

An ethics panel of eight House peers deliberated over two days before delivering a jarring blow to the 20-term New York Democrat's career. Rangel was charged with 13 counts of financial and fundraising misconduct.

The conviction also was another setback for Democrats who lost control of the House to the GOP in the midterm elections.

Rangel, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is not expected to resign. He is 80 years old and remains a dominant political figure in New York's famed Harlem neighborhood.

He was forced to step down last March as Ways and Means chairman when the House ethics committee, in a separate case, admonished him for taking two Caribbean trips paid for by corporations.

At his one-day trial on Monday, Rangel was reduced to pleading for a postponement — arguing that his lawyers abandoned him after he paid them some $2 million but could afford no more. The panel rejected his request, and Rangel walked out of the proceeding.

Rangel reacted bitterly to the conviction.

"How can anyone have confidence in the decision of the ethics subcommittee when I was deprived of due process rights, right to counsel and was not even in the room?" Rangel said in a written statement. "I can only hope that the full committee will treat me more fairly, and take into account my entire 40 years of service to the Congress before making any decisions on sanctions."

He called the panel's findings "unprecedented" because there was no rebuttal evidence. He complained that the rejection of his appeal for more time violated "the basic constitutional right to counsel."

Rangel, echoing a statement he made in August in a speech to the House, added, "any failings in my conduct were the result of "good faith mistakes" and were caused by "sloppy and careless recordkeeping, but were not criminal or corrupt."

New York Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who attended Rangel's fundraiser in August while campaigning to clean up New York politics, said, "It's obviously a sad situation to experience.

"It's important that people have full faith in the integrity in public service, so it's painful to watch," Cuomo said Tuesday at a press event near Rochester. "But we'll see what happens at the end of the process."

Only last spring, Rangel wielded significant power in the House from his position as the main writer of tax legislation. He was not present Tuesday when the verdict was announced.

The full ethics committee will now conduct a hearing on the appropriate punishment for Rangel, the silver-haired, gravelly-voiced and sartorially flashy veteran of 20 terms in the House.

Possible sanctions include a House vote deploring Rangel's conduct, a fine and denial of privileges.

The congressional panel, sitting as a jury, found that Rangel had used House stationery and staff to solicit money for a New York college center named after him. It also concluded he solicited donors for the center with interests before the Ways and Means Committee, leaving the impression the money could influence official actions.

He also was found guilty of failing to disclose at least $600,000 in assets and income in a series of inaccurate reports to Congress; using a rent-subsidized New York apartment for a campaign office, when it was designated for residential use; and failure to report to the IRS rental income from a housing unit in a Dominican Republic resort.

The ethics panel split 4-4 on a charge that Rangel violated a ban on gifts because he was to have an office — and storage of his papers — at the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York.

Two counts charging him with misuse of Congress' free mail privilege were merged into one.

The charges said the solicitation for the Rangel Center targeted foundations and businesses that were seeking official action from the House, or had interests that might be substantially affected by Rangel's congressional conduct.

However, Rangel was not accused of using his influence to pass or defeat legislation.

During Monday's trial proceeding, the chief counsel for the House ethics committee, Blake Chisam, told the jury that Rangel could have received permission to solicit nonprofit foundations. However, he could not have used congressional stationery and staff as he was found to have done.

Rangel had previously acknowledged some of the charges, including submission of 10 years' worth of incomplete and inaccurate annual statements disclosing his assets and income.

He also admitted he initially did not report his rental income from a unit he owned at the Punta Cana resort in the Dominican Republic.

An apartment in Harlem's Lennox Terrace complex housed the Rangel for Congress and National Leadership PAC political committees, when the lease terms said the unit was designated for living purposes only.

Chisam had told the jury that other tenants were evicted at an increasing rate for violating the same lease terms.

2010-11-14T18:37:00.001-08:00

VIOLENCE AGAINST SOCIAL SECURITY JUDGES IS INCREASING.

The PowerPoint released by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“The Deficit Commission”), said we should “Reform Social Security for its own sake, not for deficit reduction.”
Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Not now, not ever. However it has everything to do with political theater and public disinformation.

SocialSecurity is a political football, and now we are beginning the political Super Bowl Season.
Critics of Social Security have frequently made alarming claims about the future of the system to support calls for “reform”. Opportunists are posturing and trying to humanize the Social Security Administration (SSA). In order to do that the first group they sieze upon to spot light are the Administrative Law Judges SSA (ALJ), the 1300-1400 judges who decide disability cases.

So now the SSA and its programs are at center stage of the public political debate. An avalanche of news articles been triggered. One Associated Press article about violence against SSA Administrative Law Judges became the most frequently Email-ed article on Yahoo within 48 hours of publication two days ago. However, the article can be very misleading without some insider background information.

The public is being manipulated with these articles. These articles are diversionary. They seek to make the judges appear as victims, while it is the American public who are being victimized. The judges are gatekeepers for the Social Security Trust Fund. To understand how and why read “socialNsecurity, Confessions of a Social Security Judge”.

The AP article “Violence Against Social Security Judges” could have been witten 10 or even 20 years ago. Why now? The incidents of violence have not increased, only the threats. The threats are commonplace and go with the job.

The number one complain in disability cases in back pain. The second most common complain is a mental inpairment. Many of these claimants are seriously mantally impaired; some are certifiably insane. They talk out of their heads; and , they make threats. The ALJ is the first and sometimes only embodiment of the SSA and the Federal Governmant, so they make threats against them. But they have no means or opportunity to carry out the threats. So, by and large the threats are harmless.

Some judges will not hold a hearing without an armed Federal Protective Service officer in the hearing room. Not me. I would postpone the hearing first. I only had to do that once in my entire career as an ALJ.

Judges in Illinois were carrying guns to work in their brief cases 15 and 20 years ago. They probably still are today. The ones that I knew about, had permits to carry a fire arm. The state and the city recognized a real threat to their safety.

I have been threated. Attorneys representing claimants have been threated in my courtroom. I have heard things like “if I loose my benefits, I will kill you”. That was said by a Mexican gang member with tear drops tatoos on his face and neck to an attorney in my court room.

I never let them know where I lived. I did not give out my home address. After work, I was always cautious and vigilent in th parking lot. We had to park in the same lot as the claimants. They knew our cars.

I never went straight home after work. I drove around and made sure no one was following me.

I lived less than one mile from the Downey Hearing Office. I was prepared to meet violence at the office but not at home. I was a military veteran, so danger and threats went with the job. However, my family was not to be put at risk. If I was going to be shot, it would be at the office, not at home. If a vengeful claimant was going to blow up something it was going to be the office, not my home. An Oklahoma City type of attack was acceptable, but not violence at my private residence where my wife and 3 little children were.
Read more “socialNsecurity, Confessions Of a Social Security Judge” at www.judgelondonsteverson.com”

WASHINGTON – Judges who hear Social Security disability cases are facing a growing number of violent threats from claimants angry over being denied benefits or frustrated at lengthy delays in processing claims.

There were at least 80 threats to kill or harm administrative law judges or staff over the past year — an 18 percent increase over the previous reporting period, according to data collected by the agency.

The data was released to the Association of Administrative Law Judges and made available to The Associated Press.

One claimant in Albuquerque, N.M., called his congressman's office to say he was going to "take his guns and shoot employees" in the Social Security hearing office. In Eugene, Ore., a man who was denied benefits said he is "ready to join the Taliban and hurt some people." Another claimant denied benefits told a judge in Greenville, S.C., that he was a sniper in the military and "would go take care of the problem."

"I'm not sure the number is as significant as the kind of threats being made," said Randall Frye, a judge based in Charlotte, N.C., and the president of the judges' union. "There seem to be more threats of serious bodily harm, not only to the judge but to the judge's family."

Fifty of the incidents came between March and August, including that of a Pittsburgh claimant who threatened to kill herself outside the hearing office or fly a plane into the building like a disgruntled tax protester did earlier this year at the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas.

A Senate subcommittee is expected to hear testimony on Monday at a field hearing in Akron, Ohio, about the rising number of threats, as well as the status of the massive backlog in applications for disability benefits, which are available to people who can't work because of medical problems.

Nearly 2 million people are waiting to find out if they qualify for benefits, with many having to wait more than two years to see their first payment.

Judges say some claimants become desperate after years of fighting for money to help make ends meet.

"To many of them, we're their last best hope for getting relief in the form of income and medical benefits," said Judge Mark Brown, a vice president of the judge's union and an administrative law judge hearing cases in St. Louis.

While no judges were harmed this year, there have been past incidents: A judge in Los Angeles was hit over the head with a chair during a hearing and a judge in Newburgh, N.Y., was punched by a claimant when he showed up for work.

In January, a gunman possibly upset about a reduction in his Social Security benefits killed a security guard during a furious gunbattle at a Nevada federal courthouse.

About 1,400 administrative law judges handle appeals of Social Security disability claims at about 150 offices across the country. Many are in leased office space rather than government buildings.

Brown said the agency provides a single private security guard for each office building that houses judges. Frye said he has sought more security and a review of the policy that keeps guards out of hearing rooms. He said Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue has promised to look into it.

Social Security Administration spokeswoman Trish Nicasio said the agency continually evaluates the level and effectiveness of office security and makes changes as needed.

"We are taking appropriate steps to protect our employees and visitors while still providing the level of face-to-face service the public expects and deserves," Nicasio said.

Visitors and their belongings are screened before entering hearing offices and hearings room, she said, and reception desks are equipped with duress alarms to notify the guard immediately of any disturbance.

2010-10-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

Poor and Black Claimants Worst Effected By Video-Hearings That Are Replacing In-Person Hearings At Social Security.

(Commissioner Michael Astrue)

Social Security Administration Keeps Claimants In The Dark.

Today’s unprecedented economic crisis is bringing into sharp focus Social Security’s role as the backbone of the country’s retirement security, as well as the irresponsibility of former President George W. Bush’s policies in regard to this critical program.

Part of the Bush legacy that Astrue has continued are personnel and labor relations policies that hobble agency staff and undermine SSA’s ability to fulfill its duty to the American public. For example, Commissioner Astrue has implemented a policy prohibiting SSA employees from advising SSA claimants regarding their benefit election options. Because benefit election options, such as month of election, impact the eventual amount of benefits received, this prohibition deprives SSA claimants of advice and information

2010-10-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

This is the ultimate insider's guide to the Social Security Disability Determination System. This book explains the Five Step Disability Evaluation Process and attempts to explain why the System does not work as it was intended. It describes the rules, regulations, exceptions, and court decisions that determine the outcome of an application for disability benefits. This is not another "how to" book about filing for Social Security disability benefits. This book is about how the system works. It concerns the nature of the Social Security Disability Determination process. Written by a veteran Social Security Judge this book will simplify the process and make the Social Security Disability Process work for you.

Have you ever wondered how to get Social Security Disability benefits or why your application was denied?

Whether you are an attorney representing claimants or a claimant trying to act as your own representative, this book will show you how to prevail and collect the benefits to which you are entitled.

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are the two largest Federal assistance programs that provide financial support to those with disabilities. To qualify for benefits, you must meet specific medical criteria outlined by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The application process can be extremely complicated and confusing.

Have you ever asked yourself:

socialNsecurity

What you do not know can hurt you?
At last a book is available that explains the Social Security Disability Determination Process in simple English.
This is the ultimate insider's guide to the Social Security Disability Determination System. This book explains the Five Step Disability Evaluation Process and attempts to explain why the System does not work as it was intended. It describes the rules, regulations, exceptions, and court decisions that determine the outcome of an application for disability benefits. This is not another "how to" book about filing for Social Security disability benefits. This book is about how the system works. It concerns the nature of the Social Security Disability Determination process. Written by a veteran Social Security Judge this book will simplify the process and make the Social Security Disability Process work for you.

Have you ever wondered how to get Social Security Disability benefits or why your application was denied?

Whether you are an attorney representing claimants or a claimant trying to act as your own representative, this book will show you how to prevail and collect the benefits to which you are entitled.

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are the two largest Federal assistance programs that provide financial support to those with disabilities. To qualify for benefits, you must meet specific medical criteria outlined by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The application process can be extremely complicated and confusing.

Have you ever asked yourself:
Who is eligible for Social Security Disability Benefits?

Can I apply for Social Security Disability or SSI?

How could I increase my chance of winning Disability and/or SSI benefits?

How much money would I receive in monthly payments?

Can I work and receive Social Security Disability Payments?

Is my family entitled to Social Security Disability benefits?

What diseases are considered for Social Security Disability benefits and SSI?

Do I have to hire a lawyer?

www.judgelondonsteverson.com
https://www.createspace.com/3406851
--

2010-09-30T19:58:00.001-07:00

Judge London Steverson and Tony Curtis Forever Linked By Time and Honor.

Tony Curtis died September 30, 2010 at the age of 85. He will be remembered as both a Hollywood heartthrob and an actor with a gift for comedy. As the author of his own story he was met with mixed reviews. He was the son of Hungarian immigrants. On April 23, 2009 at about 5:00 PM at the American Embassy in Budapest, Hungary he was awarded the Cultural Diplomacy Award by Ambassador April Foley with Jeffrey Levine, the Charge d'Affaires, and Carolynn Glassman, the Cultural affairs Officer at the Embassy.

Mr. Curtis was not the only person to receive the Cultural Diplomacy Award that day in Hungary. Earlier in the day at the American Corner in Veszprem, Hungary Judge London Steverson had been presented with a Cultural Diplomacy Award. It was the opening day of the annual America Week Celebration in Hungary. The highlight of the day was the official opening of the Steverson Book Collection at the Veszprem Public Library. The Steverson Collection was a donation of over 5,000 books to the American Embassy and the people of Hungary from Judge Steverson's own personal collection. Judge Steverson's wife was born and raised in Veszprem, Hungary.

Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor had this to say about this talented Hungarian-American. Curtis wrote his own life story twice, once in "Tony Curtis: The Autobiography" (1993) and then again in "American Prince: A Memoir" (2008).

In general, "The Autobiography" was better received. Library Journal wrote, "This is Tony Curtis's story in his own words, and it is a corker. His depiction of a boyhood as a poor New York City street kid ... is moving as well as philosophical and is a recurring theme throughout his life and remarkably diverse career.... This is a literate, first-class "star" autobiography, frank and absorbing but not for the prudish."

Publishers Weekly, however, was tougher on Curtis, commenting that,"If Curtis's vanity didn't interfere, one could more readily sympathize with the man as a survivor of a mean childhood and the drug addiction from which he is recovering. Unfortunately, he blames most of his troubles on others, beginning with his parents."

USA Today said of "An American Prince" that it was "[f]illed with fond recollections of [Curtis’s] friendships with the famous and powerful but punctuated, too, by harsh words for Hollywood legends he says did him wrong…. Curtis spares few intimate details about his years as a Hollywood lothario, including his teenage affair with a redheaded, ponytailed Marilyn Monroe.”

Most readers, however, seemed to feel that while Curtis's recounting of his childhood in a tough Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood (the son of Hungarian immigrants, he didn't learn to speak English till he was 5) was absorbing, Curtis's bragging about his conquests of the opposite sex (he was married five times and had many affairs) was unappealing. ("Fun for a while, then kerplunk .... falls, like a promising cake gone bad," wrote one Amazon reader.)

In the end, however, it is not Tony Curtis the writer or even the man who will be remembered as much as it will be Tony Curtis the actor, star of "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), "The Defiant Ones" (1958), "Some Like It Hot"(1959), and "Spartacus" (1960). And perhaps that would have been fine with the man who wrote, in "American Prince," that “All my life I had one dream and that was to be in the movies.”

2010-09-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

Coast Guard to Congress, "Mind Your Own Business."

WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawmakers upset over how few Blacks attend the U.S. Coast Guard Academy have backed off their proposal to shift for the first time to congressional nominations of cadets, which have been required at the nation's other service academies for decades.

On a voice vote, the House approved a compromise Coast Guard measure late Tuesday that includes $10 billion in authorized spending, and various management reforms, but nothing intended to boost Black enrollment at the New London, Conn.-based academy. Black enrollment has been at 5 percent or less in recent years.

The academy provision was in a bill that won overwhelming bipartisan approval in a House vote last year. But it was left out of last spring's Senate-approved version. The compromise bill is expected to receive Senate approval as early as this week.

House Transportation Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., and the chairman of its Coast Guard subcommittee, Elijah Cummings, D-Md., a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, had been outspoken advocates for congressional nominations during hearings.

"Though it is critical that the authorization passes, I am certainly disappointed that there were a number of provisions we had to drop from the House-passed bill in the final revisions," Cummings said in a statement after Tuesday's vote. "Included among the dropped legislation were provisions I authored ... that would have encouraged efforts to support diversity at the Coast Guard Academy."

Advocates of congressional involvement in admissions have argued that with some 40 members of Congress typically in the Congressional Black Caucus, it would be likely that the Coast Guard Academy would have more blacks enrolled if Congress members and senators had a say in nominating qualified candidates.

But even among Black academy graduates, there has been disagreement over whether to take that route.

"I'm starting to see the critical masses that our system needs for us to have a bright future," said Vice Admiral Manson K. Brown, the highest ranking Black in Coast Guard history, who won his latest promotion last May. "I'm using my bully pulpit to help the system."
(DENNIS CONRAD,AP)

2010-09-17T09:11:00.001-07:00

Judge London Steverson
London Eugene Livingston Steverson (born March 13, 1947) was one of the first two African Americans to graduate from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1968. Later, as chief of the newly formed Minority Recruiting Section of the United States Coast Guard (USCG), he was charged with desegregating the Coast Guard Academy by recruiting minority candidates. He retired from the Coast Guard in 1988 and in 1990 was appointed to the bench as a Federal Administrative Law Judge with the Office of Hearings and Appeals, Social Security Administration.

Early Life and Education
Steverson was born and raised in Millington, Tennessee, the oldest of three children of Jerome and Ruby Steverson. At the age of 5 he was enrolled in the E. A. Harrold elementary school in a segregated school system. He later attended the all black Woodstock High School in Memphis, Tennessee, graduating valedictorian.
A Presidential Executive Order issued by President Truman had desegregated the armed forces in 1948,[1] but the service academies were lagging in officer recruiting. President Kennedy specifically challenged the United States Coast Guard Academy to tender appointments to Black high school students. London Steverson was one of the Black student to be offered such an appointment, and when he accepted the opportunity to be part of the class of 1968, he became the second African American to enter the previously all-white military academy. On June 4, 1968 Steverson graduated from the Coast Guard Academy with a BS degree in Engineering and a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Coast Guard.
In 1974, while still a member of the Coast Guard, Steverson entered The National Law Center of The George Washington University and graduated in 1977 with a Juris Doctor of Laws Degree.

USCG Assignments.
Steverson's first duty assignment out of the Academy was in Antarctic research logistical support. In July 1968 he reported aboard the Coast Guard Cutter (CGC) Glacier [2] (WAGB-4), an icebreaker operating under the control of the U.S. Navy, and served as a deck watch officer and head of the Marine Science Department. He traveled to Antarctica during two patrols from July 1968 to August 1969, supporting the research operations of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Research Project in and around McMurdo Station. During the 1969 patrol the CGC Glacier responded to an international distress call from the Argentine icebreaker General SanMartin, which they freed.
He received another military assignment from 1970 to 1972 in Juneau, Alaska as a Search and Rescue Officer. Before being certified as an Operations Duty Officer, it was necessary to become thoroughly familiar with the geography and topography of the Alaskan remote sites. Along with his office mate, Ltjg Herbert Claiborne "Bertie" Pell, the son of Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, Steverson was sent on a familiarization tour of Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force bases. The bases visited were Base Kodiak, Base Adak Island, and Attu Island, in the Aleutian Islands.[3]
Steverson was the Duty Officer on September 4, 1971 when an emergency call was received that an Alaska Airlines Boeing 727 airline passenger plane was overdue at Juneau airport. This was a Saturday and the weather was foggy with drizzling rain. Visibility was less than one-quarter mile. The 727 was en route to Seattle, Washington from Anchorage, Alaska with a scheduled stop in Juneau. There were 109 people on board and there were no survivors. Steverson received the initial alert message and began the coordination of the search and rescue effort. In a matter of hours the wreckage from the plane, with no survivors, was located on the side of a mountain about five miles from the airport. For several weeks the body parts were collected and reassembled in a staging area in the National Guard Armory only a few blocks from the Search and Rescue Center where Steverson first received the distress broadcast.[4]. Later a full investigation with the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the cause of the accident was equipment failure.[5]
Another noteworthy item is Steverson's involvement as an Operations Officer during the seizure of two Russian fishing vessels, the Kolevan and the Lamut for violating an international agreement prohibiting foreign vessels from fishing in United States territorial waters. The initial attempts at seizing the Russian vessels almost precipitated an international incident when the Russian vessels refused to proceed to a U. S. port, and instead sailed toward the Kamchatka Peninsula. Russian MIG fighter planes were scrambled, as well as American fighter planes from Elmendorf Air Force Base before the Russian vessels changed course and steamed back to Anchorage, where a U.S. Attorney was waiting to prosecute the vessels for the violations of fishing treaties.
Because of his icebreaker experience, Steverson was later made the Seventeenth District's first Ice Operations Officer. With the increased activity at Point Barrow and on the North Slope of Alaska brought on by the discovery of the vast oil reserves, more Coast Guard icebreakers were making patrols North of the Bering Sea, where icebreaking is necessary.
The Coast Guard did not have a separate Judge Advocate General's Corp (JAG). Coast Guard lawyers were called "legal specialists". These law specialists were line officers and could rotate out of the regular legal billets. Frequently these tours of duty out of specialty were in law related areas. Steverson served one such four year tour of duty as the Chief Marine Investigating Officer for the Marine Inspection Office in Battery Park, New York from 1982 to 1986. This job was similar to that of a city prosecutor. With a staff of ten investigating officers, he would investigate marine disasters for negligence and causes of action. Any marine personnel found to have violated a marine safety law would be charged and tried before a Coast Guard administrative law judge at the World Trade Center. In the case of a major marine disaster with multiple loss of life, a formal Board of Inquiry would be convened under the direction of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). These Inquiries often would result in promulgation of new marine safety regulations under Title 46 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). One such incident was the Case of The Joan LaRie III, a charter fishing vessel that sank of the coast of New Jersey on October 24, 1982. [6][7][8]

MINORITY RECRUITING.
In July 1972 Steverson was reassigned from Alaska to Washington, D.C. to become the Chief of the newly formed Minority Recruiting Section of the USCG, and was charged with working toward desegregating the nearly all-white USCG, starting with the United States Coast Guard Academy.
From 1876 until 1962 the Academy had not admitted any African-American cadets. One graduated in 1966, two graduated in 1968 (including Steverson) and one graduated in 1970. After that none were admitted until Steverson was placed in charge of the national recruiting effort. As the second minority cadet to enter and graduate from this institution, Steverson had obvious expertise in this endeavor.
He traveled the country looking for qualified minority high school students who could compete for admission. Since the Coast Guard Academy is the only one of the United States military academies that does not require a Congressional appointment, and admission is strictly on the basis of the Scholastic Aptitude Test with additional consideration of extra-curricular involvement, minority applicants stood a better chance of being admitted to the Coast Guard Academy than to Annapolis, West Point or the Air Force Academy.
His efforts were rewarded in 1973 when 28 Black cadets were sworn into the Class of 1977, and again in 1974 when 20 Black cadets were admitted as part of the Class of 1978. It was from these cadets that the Coast Guard's first African-American officers of flag rank were to come in the 1990s; officers such as Admiral Joseph Jones, Admiral Errol Brown and Admiral Manson K. Brown.
While Lieutenant Steverson was charged first and foremost with recruiting cadets for the Academy (because that is where the bulk of the career officers would come from), he was also requested to find minority college graduates who were willing receive direct commissions as lawyers and as aviators. These officers were already college graduates and had no need to attend the four year Academy, instead received a three month orientation at the Coast Guard Officer Training Center. He recruited several people from the Vanderbilt University Law School.
After serving two years in this position, he was replaced by the Academy's first graduate from Guam, Juan Tudela Salas.

Law
He next worked as a Law Specialist in the 12th Coast Guard District Office, San Francisco, California and as an Assistant U. S. Attorney for the collection of Civil Penalties under the Federal Boating Safety Act from 1979 to 1982. An Assistant District Legal Officer, he was required to defend as well as prosecute military members who had been charged with violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Occasionally he was asked to represent other officers in administrative actions involving sexual harassment and discrimination. One such case was the Case of Christine D. Balboni against the Department of Transportation and the United States Coast Guard (DOT Case No. 82-177). Ensign Balboni was one of the first female graduates of the Coast Guard Academy. She graduated in the Class of 1981 and was assigned to the Coast Guard Cutter RUSH, a high endurance law enforcement vessel stationed in Alameda, California. She filed a formal complaint of sexual harassment against three senior officers on board the RUSH. She alleged that false special fitness reports had been written concerning her and that the captain of the ship had requested her immediate transfer off the ship long before her normal rotation date. After no other lawyer would take her case, Commander Ronald Mathews, Chief of The 12th District Legal Office, assigned Lieutenant Commander Steverson to represent Ensign Balboni in a formal departmental administrative hearing before a federal administrative law judge. The charges made by Ensign Balboni were determined to be valid. The relief granted was to have the false special fitness reports removed from her service record and destroyed. She was promoted to the next higher rank. Her career was saved. No disciplinary action was taken against the offending officers.[10][11]
He became the Chief of the Investigating Division at the Marine Inspection Office New York City. In 1986 he was detailed to the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System under the Office of Vice President at the time, George H. W. Bush.
When he retired in June 1988 he became the first African-American Coast Guard Academy graduate to retire as a regular line office from the service, and held the rank of Lieutenant-Commander during his last 10 years of service.
He retired to Dumont, New Jersey and practiced law in New York, with a focus on family law and defending Coast Guardsmen accused of federal crimes. He is a member of the New York State, New York City, and Tennessee Bar Associations.
In July 1990 he was appointed a federal administrative law judge by President George W. Bush. He was assigned to the Ninth Region of the Social Security Office of Hearings and Appeals in California. [12]
In April 2009 he retired from his United States Administrative Law Judge Appointment. He devoted himself to philanthropic endeavors. The Steverson Collection at www.ekmk.hu and the Steverson Collection Book Club were his major attempts to improve literacy and to spread American culture in the non-English speaking countries of Europe.

Awards.
The Cultural Diplomacy Award was given to Judge Steverson in April 2009 by the United States Ambassador to Hungary for helping create "a foundation of trust" with the people, which can be built on to reach political, economic, and military agreements; and that combats the notion that Americans are shallow, violent, and godless. He helped to affirm that Americans have such values as family, faith, and the desire for education in common with others; he helped to create a relationship with the people, which will endure beyond changes in government; he helped to reach influential members of the society, who could not be reached through traditional diplomatic functions; and, he donated a large collection of new, used, and rare English books to the American Corners of Hungary.
The State Department Cultural Diplomacy Award is designed to honor distinguished representatives of American culture whose efforts and artistry advance America's goals of mutual understanding and the deepening of friendship between the United States and others.
Since his appointment by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 as federal administrative judge to the Ninth Region of the Social Security Office of Hearings and Appeals, Judge Steverson and family have resided in Downey City, CA, where he was president of the Downey Sister City Association for seven years, and an International Peace Ambassador.

See also
Black Cadets at the Coast Guard Academy
[edit] References
^ Truman Library - Executive Order 9981
^ http://www.laesser.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=90&Itemid=38
^ Attu Homepage
^ DCA72AZ003
^ Aviation Disasters Crashes
^ http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-m/moa/boards/joanlerie.pdf
^ http://www.webandwire.com/coast%20guard%20casualties.htm
^ Missing Body Is Found In Jersey Boat Sinking - New York Times
^ http://www.offisland.com/armedsalas.html Info about Juan Tudela Salas
^ Transitions - The Mason Spirit - George Mason University
^ Search Results - THOMAS (Library of Congress)
^ http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7862/2758/320/AljOmaha35630520.jpg
[edit] External links
Integration of the Armed Forces 1940-1965, chapter 20 Limited Response to Discrimination - includes info about President John F. Kennedy's personal involvement with the first attempts to desegregate the USCG Academy, which was a direct cause of LondonSteverson's admission into the Academy.
USCG history page - See of this page starting with caption for picture of the Lamut (about 2/3 the way down the page).
Photo of the judge in robes on the bench
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7862/2758/1600/JudgePortraitDSC03584.jpg
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7862/2758/320/AljOmaha35630520.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~uscgacademy/london.html

2010-08-18T21:16:00.001-07:00

Is There Such A Thing As Reverse Racism? No.

Is 'reverse racism' real?
(By Jennifer H. Cunningham)

Two high-profile incidents this summer thrust the concept of "reverse racism" -- minorities' belief in the superiority of their race over whites or discriminating against them -- into the spotlight. Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod lost her job and was publicly condemned last month after a heavily edited video surfaced of a speech she made implying that she was unwilling to help a white farmer. Sherrod was later vindicated, but not before she was forced to resign and the debacle cast doubt over her more than 40-year career in civil rights advocacy.

The U.S. Department of Justice also came under fire last month for its handling of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Critics, including an ex-Justice Department lawyer, claimed that the federal entity routinely failed to pursue cases involving civil rights violations against whites. Justice Department officials have said there wasn't enough evidence, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is now investigating why the charges were dropped.

TheGrio.com spoke to leading academics and sociologists for their take on the term "reverse racism," and found that the concept is deeply rooted in the idea of race in the context of power and privilege in society, and has been internalized by Americans both black and white.

"When whites talk about reverse discrimination, I feel that they are making a silly argument, because what they really want to say is that we, people of color, have the power to do to them what they have done to us from the 13th century," said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology at Duke University and author of Racism Without Racists, a book which examines how racism has evolved since the collapse of the Jim Crow era. Silva acknowledged that some minorities are prejudiced against whites, but said reverse racism implies minorities in the U.S. have the power and privilege to wholly discriminate against white people.

"The idea of reverse racism or reverse discrimination is non-sensical," Silva said. "If that by whites believe that we, people of color, have the power to enact and carry systematic policies against them -- because we don't have that."

"We do not control the economy," Silva added, "we do not control politics -- despite the election of Obama. We don't control much of this country."

The notion that racism is commingled with power was borne in part out of African-Americans defining the context of the national discussion on race following the collapse of the Jim Crow system and the end of the civil rights movement, according to Samuel Richards, senior sociology lecturer at the Pennsylvania State University. Political correctness and white guilt are also factors, Richards said. Richards, co-director of the "World in Conversation" at Penn State, which facilitates discussions on race between students across the university, said many Americans now believe if one race has power and privilege in society, they can be racist, but it's something else if you lack those things and still believe in the superiority of your race over another.

"Truthfully," Richards said, "they bought into that perspective." And although generally, it's conservative whites who use the term "reverse racism," "those same white people are accepting the debate--the assumption that only white people can be racist, or you wouldn't call it reverse," Richards said. "You'd call it racism."

The phrase "reverse racism" has been in the public lexicon since at least when the first pointed attacks on affirmative action as being discriminatory to whites began, said William A. Darity Jr. Ph.D, professor of Public Policy, African and African-American Studies and Economics at Duke.

"The folks who were constructing the critique of affirmative action definitely wanted to deliver the message that whites were being unfairly penalized by affirmative action," Darity said. "One way to do that is to inaugurate the concept of reverse racism."

And while Darity said it was not clear whether "reverse racism" was being used more frequently today than in years past, he said some in the U.S. believe the country is now a post-racial society -- epitomized by President Obama's election -- yet blacks still cling to race issues, and that the only real racists left are African-Americans.

Darity and Silva said President Obama has had to govern his administration with reverse racism in mind. Silva said that's one of the reasons why the White House and the NAACP were quick to originally distance themselves from Sherrod.

"[Obama] is so afraid of being tainted, of being viewed as the 'race man,' she didn't even get her due process," Silva said.

Reverse racism also could be why Obama may not want to be perceived as taking actions to specifically benefit African-Americans, Darity said.

"He recognizes the nature of the climate," he said, "and the climate is that it's almost worse for a Black person to be called a racist than it is for a white person. Initially, it cost Shirley Sherrod her job, in the context of a complete misunderstanding of what actually occurred."

2010-08-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Dr. Cornell West Is Upset With President Obama.
By Dr. Boyce Atkins

Dr. Cornel West apparently has a bone to pick with President Barack Obama. Over time, the good Dr. West has become increasingly vocal in his critique of Obama, and even went as far as to say that Obama treated him "like a cub scout" when he allegedly refused to address West's concerns about the administration's behavior:

"Well, I'll tell you, I had not talked to my dear brother since the Martin Luther King gathering in South Carolina, and very briefly Super Tuesday. But he did come and make a beeline to me after his speech on I think it was Thursday morning in Washington, D.C. I hadn't seen him for two and a half weeks, and he made a beeline to me, though, brother, and he was deeply upset. He talked to me like I was a cub scout, and he was a pack master. You know what I mean?

I said, well, my mother and father raised me right. I respect my dear brother, but I don't like to be demeaned and humiliated in that way, and I didn't get a chance to respond to him. And I hope maybe at some time we can. But it was very, it was a very ugly kind of moment, it seems to me, and that disturbs me because then it raises the question for me: Does he have a double standard for Black critics as opposed to white critics?"

It's no surprise that West would be on the outs with Obama. The president has an intense loyalty to Harvard University and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, the man who has proven that he has almost no appreciation for black scholarship.

I, too, find myself irritated that Obama maintains such strong allegiance to those who don't respect the African American community or care to spend any time helping us address unique social and economic challenges.

A broader point to be made about the rift between professor West and Obama is one of class: Cornel West is not just a champion for Black people. He is also a champion for the poor, the powerless and the downtrodden. Dr. West's constituency is almost directly opposed to the latte-sipping, Martha's Vineyard-vacationing, Harvard University-attending folks who run with President Obama. This reminds us that fighting for Black people can be very different from fighting for poor Black people: Obama almost always stands up for black folks as long as they either went to Harvard or have millions of dollars in the bank.

Obama has chosen an unqualified woman, Elena Kagan, for the Supreme Court, primarily because she is associated with Harvard. He spoke up for Henry Louis Gates last year, not because he was a Black man, but because he was a Harvard professor who asked for his help. Obama lives among the elite, and Cornel West is an academic version of Jeremiah Wright. The relationship between West and Obama was doomed from the very beginning, given their glaring conflict of interest. For West to be surprised at Obama's behavior is like an LA Laker getting angry that the Denver Nuggets player put the ball in the other basket. My point is that Obama and West were never on the same team to begin with.

Another speculative point that can be made about Cornel West's outspoken opposition to Obama's policies is one that relates to Tavis Smiley. I've always been of the opinion that Tavis has personal reasons for accentuating his political disappointment with President Obama. I honestly believe that had Obama been more open with Smiley and provided him with the same opportunities he has received from Hillary Clinton, Smiley would not have been so harsh in his attacks.

Cornel West, being a great friend of Tavis, has been positioned within a camp of individuals who might be disappointed with Barack Obama no matter what he does. I don't believe West dislikes Obama as much as Smiley does. West's criticism lies far more with divisions in ideology than with personal differences.

The point is that our analysis of the president should be balanced with solutions, as well as a realistic understanding of the pressures he endures while trying to run the most powerful nation on earth. Being president is never as idealistic as we'd like to believe.

All the while, the notion that we must deal with Obama with kid gloves solely because we are happy to have a Black man in the White House is absolute nonsense.

Falling in love with a politician is like asking a prostitute to be faithful. We set ourselves up for disappointment when we relate to Obama with extreme emotion, while he deals with us using cold, calculated rationality. Professor West is correct that Obama manages his Black critics differently from white ones. The differential treatment is likely because Black people don't have enough votes to keep Obama in office, nor enough economic power to change his life the way other constituents can.

As a result, Black folks remain at the back of the political bus, without regard to the color of the man in the Oval Office.

2010-07-28T04:28:00.000-07:00

Racism Is Alive and Well In America.
THE SAGA OF SHIRLEY SHERROD: AN AMERICAN STORY
By Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration

The second best thing that has happened so far in this century in this country, other than the election of an American of African descent to become President of the United States, is the saga of Shirley Sherrod.

America has always moaned, groaned and empathized with Israel and the Jewish people, because like the Jewish people, they repeat the ever popular slogan - NEVER AGAIN! Regardless of what positions Israel takes whether they are right or wrong, the United States stands up to be counted as the symbiotic twin of Israel.

I, too, empathize with the Jewish people, and unfortunately, I have to turn to the old cliché, “some of my best friends are Jewish.” In elementary and high school, many of my classmates and very dearest friends practiced and followed the Jewish religion. On the Jewish holidays, my classrooms were at least a quarter empty. I befriended and extended a welcoming hand to the Jewish children referred to as the Class of 1942; the Jewish children who were sequestered and smuggled out of Nazi Germany by the underground Zegota group in order to avoid the gas chambers to which many of their parents, siblings and neighbors were sent.

During my generation, circa 1929, gifted children were referred to as “whiz kids.” These were children that could qualify for Mensa (the organization of people with the highest I Q’s).

Gunther Hollander and I were selected by my school to appear on a radio quiz show called, “It’s A Hit.” Questions were about a variety of issues, international, national and local. For those of you who have read my previous blogs, you know I was well prepared because it was a requirement at my home to come to the dinner table prepared to report on newspaper articles we had read dealing with these very issues.

Gunther and I represented Hyde Park High School on the quiz show and did very well. I was devastated and mourned for months after Gunther was struck by a CTA bus when he ran in front of it. Newly arrived in the country and short in stature, he did not realize that a bus driver could not see him as the bus drove off. There’s Ruthie Dreyfuss, my dear friend, who as an adult became my son’s math teacher when he attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School. There was Shirley Parks (whom I don’t believe was Jewish), whose father was one of my professors when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University. There was Edward Rothschild who later became my MONY insurance agent, selected because he was a friend and classmate of mine. There was Jay Goodman, a friend and classmate whose parents brought Goodman ice cream cups to school on Jay’s birthdays. Then there was Sandy Banks who got a zero on a spelling test while I got 100. So accustomed to copying off my papers, Sandy gave himself away when he jumped up after grades were announced and said, “How could I get zero and Helen get 100 when I copied off her paper?” Need I explain to you how I taught Sandy a lesson that I hope he learned for life?

Other than children of the Jewish faith, I had Catholic friends, Protestant friends and friends of every ethnic and religious group.

To the point, America has always welcomed and integrated into her belly the people from all over the world, that is, except for those whom they brought here in chains or people of color. Those who labored in the fields and worked from sun up to sun down (from can to can’t), raped, brutalized, stripped of their language, heritage and culture, separated husbands from wives, snatched children out of their parents hands, were denied the American dream. Look at us and that tells the horrors of rape. We range in color from midnight Black to freshly fallen snow.

Slavery, the white man’s shame, remains engrained in every fabric of American life from its inception to this very day. This is a defining part of who Shirley Sherrod is; and, yet she is still being treated like a slave. Father murdered by the Klan, educated in segregated schools, portrayed as the anti-hero in this recent flap up, she and her racial group are being portrayed as the perpetrators of racism. Racism is the white man’s sickness. Racism is one of the most insidious forms of mental illness. Racism is a mental system designed expressly and exclusively to deny another human’s dignity and humanity. Held in contempt and institutionalized as being less than a human, white people have exploited this system to the fullest in order to validate their very existence.

The Jewish Holocaust was one isolated period in world history. The American Slave system is a self-perpetuating Holocaust inflicted on Americans of African descent, every day of their lives. This is undeniable and indefensible. There is more than one way to lynch a person: there is physical lynching and there is mental, emotional and spiritual lynching. Why do we have the concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law? One can be violated without the other or with both. Slavery is a violation of humanity and constitutes the cruelest form of “Man’s Inhumanity to Man." Every day, a Black person, or person of African descent walks out of his door he faces a Holocaust. Remember Amadou Diallo and Oscar Grant. In many instances lying in bed, the Holocaust is going to visit. Cases in point are Emmett Till and Fred Hampton. Policemen in America, possess powers that exceed the powers of the President of the United States. They can assume the role of judge, jury and executioner when they deliberately manhandle and frequently kill innocent, unarmed, Black people. The policeman has the discretion to place a “drop gun” beside the body of the deceased, and or drop a dime bag of cocaine beside a voiceless, defenseless, lifeless body.

Thank God for Shirley Sherrod and her saga, for hers is America’s saga; the saga of unequal justice under the law. Now the theme song of the racists is that Blacks are racists. This is called PROJECTION, another aspect of mental illness. To qualify as a racists one must have influence and power to set a negative tone and then to legislate and institutionalize this behavior. The majority of Black people have neither of these capabilities.

Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder was allegedly roughed up by police and Mae Jemison, M.D., surgeon, engineer and former astronaut, was also roughed up by police. These are just two examples of high profile, contributing members of our society, who because of their skin color were treated in the fashion to which far too many Blacks are subjected daily.

Mrs. Sherrod’s treatment demonstrates to the world what life is like on a daily basis according to the double standard practiced in America.

Her saga also underscores another deficiency in America. The information systems are almost exclusively controlled by a few super rich people who have a monopoly in controlling what Americans see, hear and think. In the hands of these few, some of whom are racists, the news (or THEIR story is almost always slanted in the message or impression they WANT to convey). This PROPANDA is passed off as NEWS.

The venerable civil rights organization, the NAACP, co-founded with white activists and Americans of African descent, was “snookered” by the viral, perpetual video of a truncated speech given by Mrs. Sherrod detailing an experience in forgiveness and divine intervention in a situation that occurred some 20 years ago. Why is her lesson and her saga so important? Her story proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that despite the meanness, the evil, the vindictive, cruel and unusual treatment to which Americans of African descent have been subjected, without relenting or relief, Americans of African descent can rise above the petty, the mean-spirit, the torture and the treachery to forgive.

Americans of African descent and the people of Africa are the most forgiving people on the face of the earth. Go to any country and the prejudice awaits them. My friends of the Class of 1942 said they were told on the boat on the way over to America that they were not to associate with Blacks because Blacks were inferior. Is that not a Holocaust? Restrictive covenants were incorporated in property deeds stressing that the property was, “never to be sold to colored people.” I learned this from a personal experience similar to that of the Hansberry family of “Raisin in the Sun” fame. Is that not racism? I am a member of the African Methodist Episcopalian faith because of Richard Allen’s refusal, as a Black person, to be moved from the front row, to the back row, to the balcony of a Methodist church in Philadelphia (the City of Brotherly Love). Is that not racism? Recently Black children, desiring to swim, were denied use of a facility in this same City of Brotherly Love. Visit churches on Sunday mornings, the Lord’s Day, and you will see a pot that is not melting. Is that not racism? Visit the Administrative offices of most American colleges and universities and you will see an absence of Blacks. Is that not racism? Visit the board rooms of the Fortune 500 and most American commercial and industrial institutions and you will see an absence of Blacks. Is that not racism?

By now, you get it America! Black people are the victims of racism, not the victimizers. It is time to do a massive national soul searching to extricate racism and to purify our hearts and our minds. Much of the wealth of this country was built on the backs of Blacks. Have they, or their ancestors, ever been compensated for that? Is that not racism? Black farmers, to whom Mrs. Sherrod referred in her speech, have never been compensated by the federal government for their losses despite the fact that White farmers have been compensated.

Until President Harry Truman ordered the military integrated, Black service people were segregated and assigned to the menial tasks of cooking, doing the laundry, serving as sentinels or used as cannon fodder. Is that not racism? What about Black heroism in every war since America became a nation on the Native Indian’s land? There’s Doris (Dorrie) Miller, General Colin Powell, the Tuskegee Airmen, the369th Regiment, the 761st Tank Battalion, the Montford Point Marines, the Triple Nickel, the Buffalo Soldiers and the list is endless. Despite the racism they experienced, they delivered for America and the preservation of this Nation.

What is needed in America is an honest recognition of the contributions made by Americans of African descent for their valor, their creativity and their innovations that have been excluded from the teaching of history in this country. If the masses knew that every single day, they wake up, they have to thank some Black person who was responsible for the things we take for granted in making this the richest, most powerful nation in the world, their mindset would be different.

We need to put a stop to racism immediately because we need mental and emotional healing. Failure to do so keeps us on the treadmill that has been and continues to be passed down from generation to generation. When you hear young children use the N word, you know this was a lesson learned in the home, fueled in America’s classroom and fostered by all American institutions.

We all could learn from Mrs. Shirley Sherrod, a heroic American lady, who has learned and is teaching the lessons of our respective religions. Her Saga should be the turning point in American justice and culture.

2010-07-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

NAACP: Useful Idiots of Liberal Racism.
(By LTC Allen West (USA, Ret.))
Let me make one thing very clear, my Mother, Elizabeth Thomas West, was a lifetime membership holder with the NAACP. Therefore growing up in our home I clearly understood the mission and vision for this organization. It was a mission and vision that enabled me to have the pride in myself and the heritage of my parents, grandparents, and extended family. It was a mission and vision that, to me, fostered a desire to excel beyond the standard and have a commitment to excellence regardless of skin color.

However, something has happened to that mission and vision, something horrific and inconsistent with the principles and values I recalled emanating from the “ole school” black community. Somewhere along the way victimization mentality has taken root in the black community resulting in astronomical unemployment rates, high incarceration rates, appalling murder rates, breakdown of the black family, and embarrassing teen pregnancy rates.

And in the light of all these negative socioeconomic indicators the NAACP decides that the preeminent focus of their national convention would be on issuing a resolution castigating the Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party movement as racist. Even Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas was so compelled as to state that the Tea Party is filled with Klan members…..but we will get to the Congressional Black Caucus a bit later.

Instead of maintaining its mission and vision, the NAACP has now become the “useful idiots” (a term coined by Vladimir Lenin) for liberal racism. They have made themselves into a political hack job organization which now seeks to maintain the liberal progressive socialist control of the 21 century plantation. It is on this new economic plantation where the liberals seek to enslave the black community in order to maintain a devoted, monolithic, voting electorate.

I find it interesting that the NAACP was silent when Senator Harry Reid made his insidious comments about President Obama was favorable, likeable, because he is “light-skinned” and did not speak in “negro dialect”. I recall that the NAACP said nothing when Vice President Joe Biden referred to Barack Hussein Obama as “clean and articulate”. The NAACP said nothing when liberals attacked Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice (birthing tubes cartoon), Michael Steele, and General Colin Powell.

In 2008, where was the NAACP to denounce the obvious case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party? Why did the NAACP not demand President George W Bush, and now, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the Obama adminstration, to prosecute this case to the fullest extent? Does the NAACP now support the same tactic which targeted the black community seeking to restrict the most fundamental of American individual rights, the right to vote? And shall the NAACP distance itself and condemn Malik Shabazz and the New Black Panther Party?

It is this duplicitous hypocrisy which allows me to state that the NAACP is shamefully now a liberal racist enabler. The upcoming mid-term elections have the Democrat party in certain peril. Therefore they have turned to their tactic of first and last resort, race baiting.

The resolution issued by the NAACP against the Tea Party is just a strategy to focus this coming election not against liberal progressive policies, which are anathema to our Republic. No, the NAACP, in conjunction with their masters, the Democrat party, seek to make this into an election based upon an insane charge of racial hatred.

We even see charlatan blasts from the past such as Julian Bond stating that Martin Luther King Jr was a socialist, a feeble attempt to garner black community acceptance of the liberal progressive agenda. We are truly on the verge of a dangerous situation in America. And yes, this also includes the lawsuit being brought against the sovereign State of Arizona, an attempt to win Hispanic votes…..an extension of liberal racism to another minority group.

We can fully expect from now until 2 November 2010 to see the usual suspects come out to promote the dishonest tyranny of the liberals. You will find the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton out to ensure blacks remain wedded to the failing liberal social welfare policies, all the time shouting how the Democrats know what is best. I find it comical that Al Sharpton has already leapt forward to head up a new left-wing grassroots group to counter the Tea Party called “One Nation”.

Does One Nation believe in higher taxes and bigger government? Will this counter group promote individual rights and freedoms, liberty, and adherence to our US Constitution? I presume this group will seek to intimidate and put forth the ideals of collectivism combined with victimhood and expansion of the “nanny-state”.

I find the Tea Party, to which I have spoken to several times, stands for fundamental principles and values consistent with that which has made America an exceptional Constitutional Republic.

Therefore, under the “leadership” of Al Sharpton, this counter group One Nation obviously stands for principles which are antithetical to our Republic.

One Nation under God Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All

In closing, I am sure you are asking why did the ole Colonel just cite the last sentence in the Pledge of Allegiance?

Liberal Racism does not believe in One Nation under God. They believe in a Nation of subjects organized into collective groups under which they shall rule, not govern, in a secular humanist based society.

Indivisible, Liberal Racism does not believe in “e pluribus unim”, they prefer a balkanized America where they can pit us against each other through their manipulated messages….such as Tea Party racism.

Liberal racism does not believe in Liberty and Justice for All, they believe in freedom defined by a ruling class elite while creating more victims who become dependent upon their dishonest benevolence. Justice in the world of Liberal Racism means social and economic justice rooted in a principle of leveling, which founding father Samuel Adams spoke against. Al Sharpton defined justice as everyone having the same in every home in America…..government engineering of results and outcomes.

The mid-term elections of 2 November 2010 comes down to “One Nation under God Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All” or the concept of One Nation under the proprietor of victimization Al Sharpton, a simpleton crony of Liberal Racism. Which shall you choose?
(By LTC Allen West (USA, Ret.))
Lieutenant Colonel Allen West (US Army, Retired) was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and is third of four generations of military servicemen in his family. His parents instilled in him a very basic principle, love of God and Country. In 2004, when it was time to retire from more than twenty years of service in the US Army, he brought his wife and two young daughters to Broward County, Florida, where he taught high school for one year. He then returned to Afghanistan as an advisor to the Afghan army, an assignment he finished in November 2007.

Allen West received his Bachelors degree from University of Tennessee and Masters degree from Kansas State University, both in political science. He also holds a Master of Military Arts and Sciences from the US Army Command and General Staff Officer College in political theory and military operations.

“Education is the great equalizer,” he says. “With a good education, any child in America can live his dream.”

Allen West knows that for our children to live their dreams, they need to be safe. He has served in several combat zones: in Operation Desert Storm, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was battalion commander for the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, and in Afghanistan, where he trained Afghan officers to take on the responsibility of securing their own country.

In his Army career, Col. West has been honored many times, including a Bronze Star, three Meritorious Service Medals, three Army Commendation Medals (one with Valor), and a Valorous Unit Award. He received his valor award as a Captain in Desert Shield/Storm, was the US Army ROTC Instructor of the Year in 1993, and was a Distinguished Honor Graduate III Corps Assault School. He proudly wears the Army Master parachutist badge, Air Assault badge, Navy/Marine Corps parachutist insignia, Italian parachutist wings, and German proficiency badge (Bronze award).

Allen is an avid distance runner, a PADI Master certified SCUBA diver, motorcyclist, and attends Community Christian Church in Tamarac Florida.

Excellence is a West family tradition. His wife, Angela, holds an MBA and PhD. and works as a financial planner. His oldest daughter, Aubrey, attends Archbishop McCarthy HS and his youngest daughter, Austen, attends Cooper City Christian Academy.

THE SAGA OF SHIRLEY SHERROD: AN AMERICAN STORY
By Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration

The second best thing that has happened so far in this century in this country, other than the election of an American of African descent to become President of the United States, is the saga of Shirley Sherrod.

America has always moaned, groaned and empathized with Israel and the Jewish people, because like the Jewish people, they repeat the ever popular slogan - NEVER AGAIN! Regardless of what positions Israel takes whether they are right or wrong, the United States stands up to be counted as the symbiotic twin of Israel.

I, too, empathize with the Jewish people, and unfortunately, I have to turn to the old cliché, “some of my best friends are Jewish.” In elementary and high school, many of my classmates and very dearest friends practiced and followed the Jewish religion. On the Jewish holidays, my classrooms were at least a quarter empty. I befriended and extended a welcoming hand to the Jewish children referred to as the Class of 1942; the Jewish children who were sequestered and smuggled out of Nazi Germany by the underground Zegota group in order to avoid the gas chambers to which many of their parents, siblings and neighbors were sent.

During my generation, circa 1929, gifted children were referred to as “whiz kids.” These were children that could qualify for Mensa (the organization of people with the highest I Q’s).

Gunther Hollander and I were selected by my school to appear on a radio quiz show called, “It’s A Hit.” Questions were about a variety of issues, international, national and local. For those of you who have read my previous blogs, you know I was well prepared because it was a requirement at my home to come to the dinner table prepared to report on newspaper articles we had read dealing with these very issues.

Gunther and I represented Hyde Park High School on the quiz show and did very well. I was devastated and mourned for months after Gunther was struck by a CTA bus when he ran in front of it. Newly arrived in the country and short in stature, he did not realize that a bus driver could not see him as the bus drove off. There’s Ruthie Dreyfuss, my dear friend, who as an adult became my son’s math teacher when he attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School. There was Shirley Parks (whom I don’t believe was Jewish), whose father was one of my professors when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University. There was Edward Rothschild who later became my MONY insurance agent, selected because he was a friend and classmate of mine. There was Jay Goodman, a friend and classmate whose parents brought Goodman ice cream cups to school on Jay’s birthdays. Then there was Sandy Banks who got a zero on a spelling test while I got 100. So accustomed to copying off my papers, Sandy gave himself away when he jumped up after grades were announced and said, “How could I get zero and Helen get 100 when I copied off her paper?” Need I explain to you how I taught Sandy a lesson that I hope he learned for life?

Other than children of the Jewish faith, I had Catholic friends, Protestant friends and friends of every ethnic and religious group.

To the point, America has always welcomed and integrated into her belly the people from all over the world, that is, except for those whom they brought here in chains or people of color. Those who labored in the fields and worked from sun up to sun down (from can to can’t), raped, brutalized, stripped of their language, heritage and culture, separated husbands from wives, snatched children out of their parents hands, were denied the American dream. Look at us and that tells the horrors of rape. We range in color from midnight Black to freshly fallen snow.

Slavery, the white man’s shame, remains engrained in every fabric of American life from its inception to this very day. This is a defining part of who Shirley Sherrod is; and, yet she is still being treated like a slave. Father murdered by the Klan, educated in segregated schools, portrayed as the anti-hero in this recent flap up, she and her racial group are being portrayed as the perpetrators of racism. Racism is the white man’s sickness. Racism is one of the most insidious forms of mental illness. Racism is a mental system designed expressly and exclusively to deny another human’s dignity and humanity. Held in contempt and institutionalized as being less than a human, white people have exploited this system to the fullest in order to validate their very existence.

The Jewish Holocaust was one isolated period in world history. The American Slave system is a self-perpetuating Holocaust inflicted on Americans of African descent, every day of their lives. This is undeniable and indefensible. There is more than one way to lynch a person: there is physical lynching and there is mental, emotional and spiritual lynching. Why do we have the concept of the letter of the law and the spirit of the law? One can be violated without the other or with both. Slavery is a violation of humanity and constitutes the cruelest form of “Man’s Inhumanity to Man." Every day, a Black person, or person of African descent walks out of his door he faces a Holocaust. Remember Amadou Diallo and Oscar Grant. In many instances lying in bed, the Holocaust is going to visit. Cases in point are Emmett Till and Fred Hampton. Policemen in America, possess powers that exceed the powers of the President of the United States. They can assume the role of judge, jury and executioner when they deliberately manhandle and frequently kill innocent, unarmed, Black people. The policeman has the discretion to place a “drop gun” beside the body of the deceased, and or drop a dime bag of cocaine beside a voiceless, defenseless, lifeless body.

Thank God for Shirley Sherrod and her saga, for hers is America’s saga; the saga of unequal justice under the law. Now the theme song of the racists is that Blacks are racists. This is called PROJECTION, another aspect of mental illness. To qualify as a racists one must have influence and power to set a negative tone and then to legislate and institutionalize this behavior. The majority of Black people have neither of these capabilities.

Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder was allegedly roughed up by police and Mae Jemison, M.D., surgeon, engineer and former astronaut, was also roughed up by police. These are just two examples of high profile, contributing members of our society, who because of their skin color were treated in the fashion to which far too many Blacks are subjected daily.

Mrs. Sherrod’s treatment demonstrates to the world what life is like on a daily basis according to the double standard practiced in America.

Her saga also underscores another deficiency in America. The information systems are almost exclusively controlled by a few super rich people who have a monopoly in controlling what Americans see, hear and think. In the hands of these few, some of whom are racists, the news (or THEIR story is almost always slanted in the message or impression they WANT to convey). This PROPANDA is passed off as NEWS.

The venerable civil rights organization, the NAACP, co-founded with white activists and Americans of African descent, was “snookered” by the viral, perpetual video of a truncated speech given by Mrs. Sherrod detailing an experience in forgiveness and divine intervention in a situation that occurred some 20 years ago. Why is her lesson and her saga so important? Her story proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that despite the meanness, the evil, the vindictive, cruel and unusual treatment to which Americans of African descent have been subjected, without relenting or relief, Americans of African descent can rise above the petty, the mean-spirit, the torture and the treachery to forgive.

Americans of African descent and the people of Africa are the most forgiving people on the face of the earth. Go to any country and the prejudice awaits them. My friends of the Class of 1942 said they were told on the boat on the way over to America that they were not to associate with Blacks because Blacks were inferior. Is that not a Holocaust? Restrictive covenants were incorporated in property deeds stressing that the property was, “never to be sold to colored people.” I learned this from a personal experience similar to that of the Hansberry family of “Raisin in the Sun” fame. Is that not racism? I am a member of the African Methodist Episcopalian faith because of Richard Allen’s refusal, as a Black person, to be moved from the front row, to the back row, to the balcony of a Methodist church in Philadelphia (the City of Brotherly Love). Is that not racism? Recently Black children, desiring to swim, were denied use of a facility in this same City of Brotherly Love. Visit churches on Sunday mornings, the Lord’s Day, and you will see a pot that is not melting. Is that not racism? Visit the Administrative offices of most American colleges and universities and you will see an absence of Blacks. Is that not racism? Visit the board rooms of the Fortune 500 and most American commercial and industrial institutions and you will see an absence of Blacks. Is that not racism?

By now, you get it America! Black people are the victims of racism, not the victimizers. It is time to do a massive national soul searching to extricate racism and to purify our hearts and our minds. Much of the wealth of this country was built on the backs of Blacks. Have they, or their ancestors, ever been compensated for that? Is that not racism? Black farmers, to whom Mrs. Sherrod referred in her speech, have never been compensated by the federal government for their losses despite the fact that White farmers have been compensated.

Until President Harry Truman ordered the military integrated, Black service people were segregated and assigned to the menial tasks of cooking, doing the laundry, serving as sentinels or used as cannon fodder. Is that not racism? What about Black heroism in every war since America became a nation on the Native Indian’s land? There’s Doris (Dorrie) Miller, General Colin Powell, the Tuskegee Airmen, the369th Regiment, the 761st Tank Battalion, the Montford Point Marines, the Triple Nickel, the Buffalo Soldiers and the list is endless. Despite the racism they experienced, they delivered for America and the preservation of this Nation.

What is needed in America is an honest recognition of the contributions made by Americans of African descent for their valor, their creativity and their innovations that have been excluded from the teaching of history in this country. If the masses knew that every single day, they wake up, they have to thank some Black person who was responsible for the things we take for granted in making this the richest, most powerful nation in the world, their mindset would be different.

We need to put a stop to racism immediately because we need mental and emotional healing. Failure to do so keeps us on the treadmill that has been and continues to be passed down from generation to generation. When you hear young children use the N word, you know this was a lesson learned in the home, fueled in America’s classroom and fostered by all American institutions.

We all could learn from Mrs. Shirley Sherrod, a heroic American lady, who has learned and is teaching the lessons of our respective religions. Her Saga should be the turning point in American justice and culture.

2010-07-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

Vernon Baker, Black American Hero. Vernon Baker is a U.S. soldier who belatedly received the Medal of Honor for his World War II battlefield valor after historians concluded he'd been wrongly denied the military's top award because he was Black, died at his home near St. Maries, Idaho. He was 90.

Baker died July 13, 2010 of complications of brain cancer, Benewah County coroner and funeral home owner Ron Hodge said.

Then-President Bill Clinton presented the nation's highest award for battlefield valor to Baker in 1997. He was one of just seven Black soldiers to receive it and the only living recipient.

"The only thing that I can say to those who are not here with me is, 'Thank you, fellas, well done,'" Baker told The Washington Post after the ceremony. "'And I will always remember you.'"

In 1944, 2nd Lt. Baker was sent to Italy with a full platoon of 54 men. On April 5, he and his soldiers found themselves behind enemy lines near Viareggio, Italy. When concentrated enemy fire from several machine gun emplacements stopped his company's advance, Baker crawled to one and destroyed it, killing three Germans. Continuing forward, he attacked an enemy observation post and killed two occupants.

With the aid of one of his men, Baker attacked two more machine gun nests, killing or wounding the four enemy soldiers occupying these positions. Then he covered the evacuation of his wounded soldiers by occupying an exposed position and drawing the enemy's fire.

On the following night, Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy mine fields and heavy fire.

In all, Baker and his platoon killed 26 Germans and destroyed six machine gun nests, two observer posts and four dugouts.

He said later he felt the company commander, who said he was going to get reinforcements, had abandoned his group of men.

"It made me all the more determined to accomplish our mission," he told the PBS series "American Valor." "Because at that time the Army was segregated. It was thought that we were unable to fight."

No Black soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II, although Baker did receive the Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross.

In 1993, U.S. Army officials contracted Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., to study whether there was a racial disparity in the way Medal of Honor recipients were selected.

Historians did not find official evidence suggesting racial bias in the Army's award policy. But the study's authors say the political climate and common Army practices guaranteed no Black soldier would ever receive the military's top award.

The university researchers recommended 10 soldiers to receive it. From that list, Pentagon officials picked seven.

But there was one problem - the statutory limit for presentation had expired. Congress was required to pass legislation that allowed the president to award the Medals of Honor so many years after the action.

Vernon Baker was the only recipient still living; the other six soldiers received their awards posthumously, with their medals being presented to family members.

Baker was initially rebuffed when he tried to join the Army. Baker said in an interview with public television that a recruiter told him there was no quota for enlisting "you people."

Reflecting on life in a segregated Army unit, he told The Washington Post, "I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it." He added that he "knew things would get better, and I'm glad to say that I'm here to see it."

Baker returned to his northern Idaho home after the war. When he received a call telling him he was to receive a Medal of Honor, at first he was astonished. Then he was angry.

"It was something that I felt should have been done a long time ago," he told Idaho public television. "If I was worthy of receiving the Medal of Honor in 1945, I should have received it then."

Baker called his 1997 memoir "Lasting Valor."

U.S. Rep. Walt Minnick said he met Vernon Baker in the 1990s when the soldier spoke at a College of Idaho event. Minnick said he'd been expecting a battle-hardened soldier but was instead struck by Baker's gentle demeanor. Minnick said Baker's valor on the battlefield in Italy was a rebuke of racist policies that dominated the U.S. military into the middle of the last century.

"His actions on the front line demonstrates better than words can describe why discrimination and segregation in the military was both unfair and absolutely inconsistent with an effective fighting force," Minnick said. "He demonstrated a degree of courage few people have. He was prepared to give his life for his country - a country in which he was considered a second-class citizen."

Baker was born in 1919 in Wyoming. Orphaned as a small child, he was raised by his grandparents in Cheyenne. He was working as a railroad porter when he decided to join the Army in mid-1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor.

In 2004, Baker underwent emergency surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor. Before he fell ill, he had failed to sign up for benefits from Veterans Affairs and Medicare, not realizing what the requirements were. Community members and politicians in Idaho pitched in to help him get aid for his unpaid medical bills.

Hodge said Baker continued to battle brain cancer over the next years, and he recently began receiving hospice care at his home. Baker was surrounded by his family when he died Tuesday evening.

2010-06-17T05:09:00.000-07:00

SLAVE LABOR AND THE BUILDING OF WASHINGTON, DC.

I had an extraordinary experience today (6/17/20100. I was welcomed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to the U.S. Capitol. She was greeting those guests who had come to honor the memory of the slaves who contributed immeasurably to building this Temple of Freedom. I sat with my longtime friends—former Congressman J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) and Republican National Chairman Michael Steele.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)—who marched with Dr. King for civil rights in the 1960s—spoke movingly of the role of those enslaved black Americans who toiled through Washington’s sultry summers and through those bitter cold winters. These slaves worked for $5 a month. That money was paid not to the slaves themselves, but to their masters! The very foundations of our U.S. Capitol were put in place by hands that bore the cold manacles of bondage. It’s a stirring story which John Lewis—who felt the lash of the segregationists on his own back—told with eloquence.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) co-chaired the House-Senate committee that made possible today’s ceremony. She and J.C. Watts unveiled plaques honoring the labors of those American slaves. For two hundred years, Sen. Lincoln reminded us, there had been no recognition in the Capitol of the work of the slaves.

The high point of today’s event had to be the telling—and telling over and over—of the story of Philip Reid. This young black man had worked for sculptor Thomas Crawford. When the Statue of Freedom that Crawford crafted in his studios in Rome eventually came to America from Italy, the plaster cast had been disassembled. Crawford had died. A dispute on these shores caused a crisis. How to re-assemble the cast so that a bronze statue could be fashioned?

None of the free citizens of Washington knew what to do. But Philip Reid knew. He showed how to rig a block-and-tackle and the workers very slowly tugged at the plaster cast until the first seam was revealed. He did this for each of the five successive sections of the Statue of Freedom.

Thanks to Philip Reid, we now have this magnificent 19-foot monument that stands majestically atop our U.S. Capitol dome. She was put in place in time for President Lincoln’s Second Inauguration. By the time that statue came to stand on her lofty pedestal, Philip Reid and his brothers in toil were free men.

Several of the speakers—Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) re-told the Philip Reid story, or portions of it. That’s actually good and long overdue. The silence of the centuries now yields to a swelling chorus of the Union. Today was one of those rare moments when Republicans and Democrats, Americans black and white, could come together for justice.

I was proud to be a part of history today. But I have one suggestion: we should re-name the Rayburn Room where we met today the Philip Reid Room. There was some confusion getting to the ceremony, since there is already a Rayburn House Office Building just across Independence Avenue. It would be no disrespect to the already greatly honored Speaker Sam Rayburn at long last to give Philip Reid his due.

In that way, we can honor this respected artisan, his labors, and the labors of all those black Americans who worked to build up this Temple of Freedom.
(Ken Blackwell)

2010-05-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-05-10T09:00:00.001-07:00

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."

2010-05-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

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."

2010-05-01T11:17:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-05-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

Benjamin L. Hooks, dead at 85.
Civil rights leader Benjamin L. Hooks, who shrugged off
courtroom slurs as a young lawyer before earning a pioneering
judgeship and later reviving a flagging NAACP, died Thursday 15 April
in Memphis, TN. He was 85.

Across the country, political leaders and Hooks' peers in the civil
rights movement remembered his remarkably wide-ranging accomplishments
and said he'd want the fight for social justice to continue. State
Rep. Ulysses Jones, a member of the church where Hooks was pastor,
said Hooks died at his home following a long illness.

"Our national life is richer for the time Dr. Hooks spent on this
earth," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "And our union is
more perfect for the way he spent it: Giving a voice to the
voiceless."

Hooks took over as the NAACP's executive director at a time when the
organization's stature had diminished in 1977. Years removed from the
civil rights battles of the 1960s, the group was $1 million in debt
and its membership had shrunk to 200,000 members from nearly a
half-million a decade earlier.

"Black Americans are not defeated," he told Ebony magazine soon after
his induction. "The civil rights movement is not dead. If anyone
thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think
again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had
better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to
demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks."

By the time he left as executive director in 1992, the group had
rebounded, with membership growing by several hundred thousand. He
used community radiothons to raise awareness of local NAACP branches'
work and to boost membership.

"He came in at a time the NAACP was struggling and gave it a strong
foundation. He brought dignity and strong leadership to the
organization," Jones said.

Current NAACP President Benjamin Jealous recalled a speech Hooks gave
last year that was "as fiery as any he's given 50 years earlier,"
despite Hooks' diminished health at the time.

"Right up to the last, he conveyed ... the need for us to fight," Jealous said.

State Rep. John Deberry, a fellow minister and chairman of the
Tennessee Black Caucus, said Hooks' passing is a sobering reminder
that "we are losing an incredible generation of men and women who
changed the world."

"And I hope that all these young folks who accept their rights with
such a cavalier attitude, those who are disrespectful to their
seniors, those who go to these schools and misuse the opportunities
... realize that as these men and women move off the scene, that
somebody has to step up," Deberry said.

Hooks' inspiration to fight social injustice and bigotry stemmed from
his experience guarding Italian prisoners of war while serving
overseas in the Army during World War II. Foreign prisoners were
allowed to eat in "for whites only" restaurants while he was barred
from them.

When no law school in the South would admit him, he used the GI bill
to attend DePaul University in Chicago, where he earned a law degree
in 1948. He later opened his own law practice in his hometown of
Memphis, Tennessee.

"At that time you were insulted by law clerks, excluded from white bar
associations and when I was in court, I was lucky to be called 'Ben,'"
he once said in an interview with Jet magazine. "Usually it was just
'boy.'"

In 1965 he was appointed to a newly created seat on the Tennessee
Criminal Court, making him the first Black judge since Reconstruction
in a state trial court anywhere in the South.

President Richard Nixon nominated Hooks to the Federal Communications
Commission in 1972. He was its first Black commissioner, serving for
five years before resigning to lead the NAACP.

At the FCC, he addressed the lack of minority leadership in media and
persuaded the commission to propose a new rule requiring TV and radio
stations to be offered publicly before they could be sold. Minority
employment in broadcasting grew from 3 percent to 15 percent during
his tenure.

In the waning years of his leadership of the NAACP, Hooks pressed
then-President George H.W. Bush for action on a string of gasoline
bomb attacks in the South that killed a federal judge in Alabama and a
Black civil rights lawyer in Georgia in December 1989. The same month,
another bomb was intercepted at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla.

"We believe that this latest incident is an effort to intimidate our
association, to strike fear in our hearts," Hooks said at the time.
"It will not succeed. We intend to go about our business, but we will
most certainly be taking precautions."

The man later convicted of the killings and other charges remains on
Alabama's death row.

Hooks later was chairman of the board of directors of the National
Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and helped create The Benjamin L. Hooks
Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis.

He also created an initiative that gave more employment opportunities
to Blacks in Major League Baseball and launched a program in which
corporations supported development projects in Black communities.

President George W. Bush in 2007 presented Hooks with the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, one of the country's highest civilian honors.

"Dr. Hooks was a calm yet forceful voice for fairness, opportunity and
personal responsibility," Bush said in 2007. "He never tired or
faltered in demanding that our nation live up to its founding ideals
of liberty and equality."

In his last keynote speech to an NAACP national convention in 1992,
Hooks urged members who had found financial success to never forget
those less fortunate.

"Remember," he said, "that down in the valley where crime abounds and
dope proliferates ... where babies are having babies, our brothers and
sisters are crying to us, 'Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?'"

2010-04-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

Herb Ellis, the critically acclaimed jazz guitarist has died.

LOS ANGELES – Herb Ellis, the critically acclaimed jazz guitarist who played with such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald and was a member once of the celebrated Oscar Peterson Trio, died Sunday 28 March 2010, his son said. He was 88.

Mitch Ellis, the musician's son, said that his father died of complications associated with Alzheimer's disease at his Los Angeles home.

Ellis, born in 1921 in Farmersville, Texas, was regarded as one of the finest jazz guitar soloists. He mixed bebop with country twang in a career that spanned six decades.

After an early stint playing with big band leader Jimmy Dorsey, Ellis and two Dorsey colleagues formed the Soft Winds trio, whose "Detour Ahead" became a jazz standard, recorded most memorably by Billie Holiday.

"As jazz has changed through the years and different styles have developed, Ellis always remained true to the form he played from the beginning," Recording Academy President and CEO Neil Portnow said in a statement. "The jazz world has lost a great musician, and we extend our deepest sympathies to his family, friends and all who enjoyed his work."

Ellis attracted the most notoriety performing with the Oscar Peterson Trio for five years from 1953 to 1958 with pianist Peterson and bassist Ray Brown. He later went on to tour and record with Fitzgerald and was a frequent participant in record producer Norman Granz's all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic touring shows.

Born in Farmersville, Texas and raised in the suburbs of Dallas, Ellis first heard the electric guitar performed by George Barnes on a radio program. This experience is said to have inspired him to take up the guitar. He became proficient on the instrument by the time he entered North Texas State University as a music major. Ellis majored in music, but because they did not yet have a guitar program at that time, he studied the string bass. Unfortunately, due to lack of funds, his college days were short lived. In 1941, Ellis dropped out of college and toured for 6 months with a band from the University of Kansas.

In 1943, he joined Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra and it was with Gray's band that he got his first recognition in the jazz magazines. After Gray's band, Ellis joined the Jimmy Dorsey band where he played some of his first recorded solos. Ellis remained with Dorsey through 1947, traveling and recording extensively, and playing in dance halls and movie palaces. Then came a turnabout that would change Ellis's career forever. Then, as pianist Lou Carter told journalist Robert Dupuis in a 1996 interview, "The Dorsey band had a six-week hole in the schedule. The three of us had played together some with the big band. John Frigo, who had already left the band, knew the owner of the Peter Stuyvesant Hotel in Buffalo. We went in there and stayed six months. And that's how the group the Soft Winds were born."

The Soft Winds group was fashioned after the Nat King Cole Trio. They stayed together until 1952. Ellis then joined the Oscar Peterson Trio (replacing Barney Kessel), forming what Scott Yanow would later on refer to as "one of the most memorable of all the piano, guitar, and bass trios in jazz history".

Ellis became prominent after performing with the Oscar Peterson Trio from 1953 to 1958 along with pianist Peterson and bassist Ray Brown. He was a somewhat controversial member of the trio, because he was the only white person in the group in a time when racism was still very much widespread.

In addition to their great live and recorded work as the Oscar Peterson Trio, this unit served as the virtual "house rhythm section" for Norman Granz's Verve Records, supporting the likes of tenormen Ben Webster and Stan Getz, as well as trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, and Sweets Edison and other jazz stalwarts. With drummer Buddy Rich, they were also the backing band for popular "comeback" albums by the duet of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

The trio were one of the mainstays of Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts as they swept the jazz world, almost constantly touring the United States and Europe. Ellis left the Peterson Trio in November 1958, to be replaced not by a guitarist, but by drummer Ed Thigpen. The years of 1959 through 1960 found Ellis touring with Ella Fitzgerald.

The three provided a stirring rendition of "Tenderly" as a jazz improvisational backdrop to John Hubley's 1958 cartoon The Tender Game, Storyboard Film's version of the age-old story of boy falling head over heels for girl.[4]

With fellow jazz guitarists Barney Kessel, Charlie Byrd and Tal Farlow, he created another ensemble, the Great Guitars.

Ellis died of Alzheimer's disease at his Los Angeles home on the morning of March 28, 2010, at the age of 88.

Ellis is survived by his wife Patti, son, daughter and three grandchildren.

2010-03-04T05:41:00.000-08:00

Why Do We Observe Black History Month?

We observe Black History Month because of Social Darwinism and the negative effects that it has had on the education of American scholars and the low self-esteem it has given African Americans.

Social Darwinism is a social theory advanced to justify a political ideology that would justify the institution of human bondage, that is, slavery in America. Social Darwinism taught that:
- Blacks were inferior beings;
- Of all the people in the world, Blacks were the dumbest;
- Blacks had smaller brains and the least intellectual capacity;
-Because they came from Africa,the birthplace of civilization, they were inferior;
- Africa had not produced any worthwhile contributions to the advancement of civilization (if you ignore Egypt, Mali, Timbuktu, Abysynnia, Carthage, Hannibal, Saint Augustine, etc)
- Black african civilization was inferior to white European;
- Black history was not worth studying in American schools and colleges;
- Students should be taught to despise Africa and African history;
- Students should esteem and admire white European culture and history;
- Blacks were only a little bit above monkeys, gorillas, chimps on the social ladder;
- Blacks were sub-human;
- Blacks could be bought and sold because they were chattel, like cows, or horses;
- They could be worked to death without any compensation;
- They could be sexually exploited, but not married, because they did not have a soul;
- They were descended from Ham, a son of Noah, and they were cursed by Noah, because Ham had looked upon his father's nakedness and laughed.

The first Black Gold traded on Wall Street was Black slaves from Africa, not oil from the Middle East. The New York stock Exchange traded human chattel and grew rich.

The One Drop Rule allowed a slave owner to satisfy his sexual lust and increase his investment by sexually exploiting his female slaves. if a white man had children by a slave, the children would be slaves. Their physical traits were not relevant. A blond-haired, blue-eyed offspring was still a slave and could be sold. The children of the children would be slaves for a hundred generations.

Slavery was more than just a way of life in the South. Slavery was a culture. Its roots ran deep. Slavery was so prevalent that it penetrated the Southerners' gene pool. It was passed on from one generation to the next. White children were born believing they were superior even before they were taught to look down on Blacks.

Then, along came Dr Carter G. Woodson. Born in 1875 in Canton, VA, ten years after the end of the Civil War. He was to become the Father of Black History Month.

His parents had been slaves. When he was born they were working as share-croppers. This was a new form of slavery, covered up with certain niceties of the flesh.

One of nine children, he struggled to get an education. In 1912 he received a PhD from Harvard University, making him the second Black in U.S. history to receive a PhD. The first was W.E.B. DuBois.

He co-founded The Association for The Study of Negro Life and History.
In 1915 he published his first book entitled The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. It was an account of desperate and prolonged struggle for the mental and spiritual enlightenment of the slave.

In 1916 he started the Journal of Negro History.
He taught a class for Phd candidates. One of his students said "Dr. Woodson's course in Black History added romance and spice to the study of American History because he taught it as a constructive part of a whole, not as solitary fragments."

Most libraries were segregated and not accessible to Blacks. the Library of Congress was not. So, he did his research there. he documented a 5,000 item collection of Black History artifacts containing a Bill-of-Sale for a slave from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison. These were Founding Fathers. Both were former Presidents of the
United States. One was a former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1933 in a book entitled The Mis-Education of hte Negro he condemned any educational institution for Blacks that failed to teach African History with European culture, because to do so wouldleave the Blacks with a false sense of inferiority and would give the whites a false sense of superiority.

In February 1926 Negro History Week began to be celebrated between the birthdays of Presidents George Washing and Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglas. Churches and schools were hold special commemorative services to focus on Black African people and events of historical significance.

In 1976 as part of America's Bi-Centennial Celebration, Black History Week was enlarged to Black History Month. An Executive Order and Presidential Proclamation by President Gerald Ford expanded the time period.

In 1978, Alex Haley, the author of ROOTS was present in Washington, DC for a special program in celebration of Black History Month.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson dedicated his life to the dream of teaching contributions Africa and her children to the advancement of human civilization.
He died in Washington, DC in 1950.

He believed that fleecey locks and black complexions could not forfeit nature's claim; that affection dwells in black and white the same. If a man is tall enough to reach the North Pole, or to grasp the Pacific Ocean in a spann; he still must be judged by his soul, because the mind is the standard of the man.

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
"The African-American National Anthem"— was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) and then set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954) in 1900.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release February 01, 2010
Presidential Proclamation
National African American History Month

A PROCLAMATION

In the centuries since African Americans first arrived on our shores, they have known the bitterness of slavery and oppression, the hope of progress, and the triumph of the American Dream. African American history is an essential thread of the American narrative that traces our Nation's enduring struggle to perfect itself. Each February, we recognize African American History Month as a moment to reflect upon how far we have come as a Nation, and what challenges remain. This year's theme, "The History of Black Economic Empowerment," calls upon us to honor the African Americans who overcame injustice and inequality to achieve financial independence and the security of self empowerment that comes with it.

Nearly 100 years after the Civil War, African Americans still faced daunting challenges and indignities. Widespread racial prejudice inhibited their opportunities, and institutional discrimination such as black codes and Jim Crow laws denied them full citizenship rights. Despite these seemingly impossible barriers, pioneering African Americans blazed trails for themselves and their children. They became skilled workers and professionals. They purchased land, and a new generation of black entrepreneurs founded banks, educational institutions, newspapers, hospitals, and businesses of all kinds.

This month, we recognize the courage and tenacity of so many hard-working Americans whose legacies are woven into the fabric of our Nation. We are heirs to their extraordinary progress. Racial prejudice is no longer the steepest barrier to opportunity for most African Americans, yet substantial obstacles remain in the remnants of past discrimination. Structural inequalities -- from disparities in education and health care to the vicious cycle of poverty -- still pose enormous hurdles for black communities across America.

Overcoming today's challenges will require the same dedication and sense of urgency that enabled past generations of African Americans to rise above the injustices of their time. That is why my Administration is laying a new foundation for long-term economic growth that helps more than just a privileged few. We are working hard to give small businesses much-needed credit, to slash tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, and to give those same breaks to companies that create jobs here at home. We are also reinvesting in our schools and making college more affordable, because a world class education is our country's best roadmap to prosperity.

These initiatives will expand opportunities for African Americans, and for all Americans, but parents and community leaders must also be partners in this effort. We must push our children to reach for the full measure of their potential, just as the innovators who succeeded in previous generations pushed their children to achieve something greater. In the volumes of black history, much remains unwritten. Let us add our own chapter, full of progress and ambition, so that our children's children will know that we, too, did our part to erase an unjust past and build a brighter future.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim February 2010 as National African American History Month. I call upon public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of February, in the year of our Lord two thousand ten, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

BARACK OBAMA

2010-02-09T06:22:00.000-08:00

Black Woman Invented The Terminator.

A less than accurate newspaper article about Sophia Stewart and her case caused many to believe that she had won her copyright infringement suit claiming authorship of the Terminator and Matrix manuscripts and was about to receive a multi-billion dollar settlement. This 28 October 2004 article, penned by a second-year communications student for the Salt Lake Community College Globe, erred in mistaking Sophia Stewart's 4 October 2004 Los Angeles Federal Central District Court victory against a dismissal motion for her having eventually prevailed in her copywright imfringement suit. The article asserted Stewart "will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels" and would "soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood." What Sophia Stewart had won was the right to proceed with her case. This was a prediction not a fait accompli.

The Globe subsequently posted the following correction:
In reference to the recent article entitled "Mother of the Matrix Victorious," some information has been deemed misleading. Ms. Sophia Stewart has not yet won her case against Joel Silver, Time Warner and the Wachowski Bros. The decision on October 4th enabled Ms. Stewart to proceed with her case, as all attempts to have it dismissed were unsuccessful. Ms. Stewart's case will proceed through the Los Angeles Federal Central District Court of California.

Thanks,
The Globe Staff

(Author's NOTE) However, that is not the end of the story. Due to the size of the potential award, and the power of the Defendant, it is not inconceiveable that a condition of a potential settlement would have required Sophia Stewart to take a cash settlement and to make no more waves. It was not determined that she was not the victim of copywright imfringement. Indeed, this would have been a perfectly acceptable face saving conclusion to the litigation for Time Warner. It is such a pity that in this day and age, one can never accept the obvious as true. A critical thinker should always look to the less obvious and consider the possibility. Since truth is stronger than fiction, it is entirely feasible that the following story in the logical conclusion of the litigation set in motion by Sophia Stewart's law suit against Time Warner, et. al. for theft of intellectual property and copywright imfingement.

Black Woman Invented The Terminator, and The Matrix.

Black Author wins The Matrix Copyright Infringement Case
This little known story has met a just conclusion, as Sophia Stewart, African American author of The Matrix will finally receive her just due from the copyright infringement of her original work!!!

A six-year dispute has ended involving Sophia Stewart, the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver and Warner Brothers. Stewart's allegations, involving copyright infringement and racketeering, were received and acknowledged by the Central District of California, Judge Margaret Morrow presiding.

Stewart, a New Yorker who has resided in Salt Lake City for the past five years, will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels. She will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood , as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars.

Stewart filed her case in 1999, after viewing the Matrix, which she felt had been based on her manuscript, 'The Third Eye,' copyrighted in 1981. In the mid-eighties Stewart had submitted her manuscript to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works..

According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in an attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that 'credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers.' These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart's original work and that it had been 'often used during preparation of the motion pictures.' The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart's case dismissed, without success.

Stewart has confronted skepticism on all sides, much of which comes from Matrix fans, who are strangely loyal to the Wachowski Brothers. One on-line forum, entitled Matrix Explained has an entire section devoted to Stewart. Some who have researched her history and writings are open to her story.

Others are suspicious and mocking. 'It doesn't bother me,' said Stewart in a phone interview last week, 'I always knew what was true.'

Some fans, are unaware of the case or they question its legitimacy, due to the fact that it has received little to no media coverage. Though the case was not made public until October of 2003, Stewart has her own explanation, as quoted at aghettotymz.com :

'The reason you have not seen any of this in the media is because Warner Brothers parent company is AOL-Time Warner.... this GIANT owns 95 percent of the media... let me give you a clue as to what they own in the media business... New York Times papers/magazines, LA Times papers/magazines, People Magazine, CNN news, Extra, Celebrity Justice, Entertainment Tonight, HBO, New Line Cinema, DreamWorks, Newsweek, Village Roadshow and many, many more! They are not going to report on themselves. They have been suppressing my case for years.'

Fans who have taken Stewart's allegations seriously, have found eerie mythological parallels, which seem significant in a case that revolves around the highly metaphorical and symbolic Matrix series. Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom has been referenced many times in speculation about Stewart. In one book about the Goddess Sophia, it reads, 'The black goddess is the mistress of web creation spun in her divine matrix.'

Although there have been outside implications as to racial injustice (Stewart is African American), she does not feel that this is the case. 'This is all about the Benjamins,' said Stewart. 'It's not about money with me. It's about justice.'

Stewart's future plans involve a record label, entitled Popsilk Records, and a motion picture production company, All Eyez On Me, in reference to God. 'I wrote The Third Eye to wake people up, to remind them why God put them here. There's more to life than money,' said Stewart. 'My whole to the world is about God and good and about choice, about spirituality over 'technocracy'.'

If Stewart represents spirituality, then she truly has prevailed over the 'technocracy' represented in both the Terminator and the Matrix, and now, ironically, by their supposed creators.

Stewart is currently having discussions with CBS about a possible exclusive story and has several media engagements in the near future to nationally publicize her victory. June 13th 2004. Sophia Stewart's press release read: 'The Matrix & Terminator movie franchises have made world history and have ultimately changed the way people view movies and how Hollywood does business, yet the real truth about the creator and creation of these films continue to elude the masses because the hidden secret of the matter is that these films were created and written by a Black woman...a Black woman named Sophia Stewart. But Hollywood does not want you to know this fact simply because it would change history. Also it would encourage our Black children to realize a dream and that is...nothing is impossible for them to achieve!'

Greg Thomas, Editor

PRESS RELEASE.
December 23, 2008.

Screenplay writer Stewart, better known as Mother of the Matrix and author of the book the Third Eye, will soon be releasing her own version of the continuation of the series. The Matrix which was released in 1999 , which starred actors Kenau Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie Ann Moss was listed as one of the most successful box office hits in the history of the movie industry. Also, the movie featured the successful digital innovation that revolutionized cyber, techno, cinematography, special effects and was a first of it’s kind to do so, with much of the credit given to the original writer, Sophia Stewart .

Although Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, James Cameron, Joel Silver, Andy and Larry Wachowski were sued by Ms Stewart. in the U.S Federal Court, for illegal use, infringement, redevelopment, reproduction, distribution and promotion of Stewart’s copyrighted literary work entitled “The Third Eye” which was the source of the creation and development of the Matrix, Stewart feels, it is time to put forth more of the work.

For years moviegoers and Matrix fans around the world have been both analytical and critical to obvious missing links connecting the first Matrix Movie with it’s sequels The Matrix Reloaded (May, 2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (November, 2003). Ms Stewart states” It is very difficult to make effective sequels when you are not the original source of the ideology and philosophy of the work and this is where the audiences and fans of the Matrix was shortchanged.”

Sophia Stewart’s new release of M4 will finally address the questions that for years many fans have sought to have answered in the sequels of the Matrix.

M4 a live action film , will feature cyber, techno, cinematography, never before seen epic special effects and graphics, hidden code sequences, and unique concepts, that will surpass Stewart's creative work used to revolutionize the movie industry and that of the first Matrix Movie.

MATRX 4 THE EVOLUTION, which is currently in pre production, has already garnered a lot of attention from studios in the movie industry wanting a piece of the pie and is certainly being billed as the next blockbuster release project for Matrix fans and moviegoers worldwide.

Ginepri Capitol-Sega of wall street have expressed interest in the tunes of a $150 million dollars to continute the billion dollar franschise.Ginepri Capital is a Hedge Fund with well into the nine figures under active management and a leveraged capacity of approximately $4.6 billion.

It appears that interest in the making of Stewart's M4 is so intense, she has received phone calls from Hip Hop moguls such as Curtis Jackson a.k.a. 50 cent, who would like to be one of the Executive Producers on the movie. Global recognition and offers have come, as far as the Middle East, China, France, Japan, Ukraine, Italy and Germany.

Sophia Stewart has expressed interest in having the original cast, producers, and technical people of the Matrix Trilogies to continue her creativity.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Sophia Stewart

Matrix4TheMovie@yahoo.com

* We will set-up conference calls for Serious inquiries only

Posted: 12/26/2008 at 23:23 Read 11 times | 0 comments | Leave Comment

Recent Decision Order
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF UTAH CENTRAL DIVISION

SOPHIA STEWART,Plaintiff,
vs.
MICHAEL T. STOLLER, JONATHAN LUBELL, DEAN WEBB, GARYBROWN, and JOHN DOES I through X,

Defendants.

MEMORANDUM DECISION AND ORDER

Case No. 2:07CV552 DAK

This matter is before the court on (1) Defendant Gary S. Brown’s (“Mr. Brown) Motion to Dismiss or Change Venue to the Central District of Los Angeles, California; (2) DefendantDean Webb’s (“Mr. Webb”) Motion to Dismiss or in the Alternative, Motion to Change Venue;(3) Defendant Michael T. Stoller’s (“Mr. Stoller”) Motion to Dismiss and his Joinder in the other Motions to Change Venue; and (4) Defendant Jonathon Lubell’s (“Mr. Lubell”) Motion to Dismiss and Motion to Change Venue.
A hearing on the motions was held on June 25, 2008. At the hearing, Mr. Brown represented himself and appeared via telephone. Mr. Webb was represented by Kathleen Liuzzi.Mr. Stoller and Mr. Lubell represented themselves.

Plaintiff Sophia Stewart (“Ms. Stewart”) was represented by Kevin Moriarty. Before the hearing, the court carefully considered the memoranda and other materials submitted by the parties. Since taking the matter under advisement, the court has further considered the law and facts relating to these motions. NowCase 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008

Page 1 of 9 The following “facts” are taken from Plaintiff’s Complaint and are assumed to be true 1 for purposes of these motions to dismiss.2 being fully advised, the court renders the following Memorandum Decision and Order.
BACKGROUND 1 This case is primarily a legal malpractice action against Ms. Stewart’s attorneys in aprevious copyright infringement lawsuit (the “Infringement Action”) that she had filed inCalifornia in 2004. In her prior lawsuit, she alleged that Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski,Thea Bloom, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., JamesCameron, Gale Ann Hurd and Joel Silver appropriated and infringed on her copyrighted material in creating the Matrix and Terminator Trilogies. Her case, however, was dismissed on May 18,2005, and judgment was entered against Ms. Stewart on June 14, 2005.In the instant case, Ms. Stewart alleges that the Infringement Action was dismissed because of Defendants’ malpractice, negligence, conspiracy and breaches of contract. Specifically she claims that summary judgment was entered against her in the underlying case because her attorneys–without her knowledge–failed to produce her for a deposition, neverconducted any discovery, and failed to respond to the defendant’s discovery requests, including failing to respond to requests for admissions, which facts were later deemed admitted.Defendants in the instant action have made two arguments for dismissal. First, theyargue that Ms. Stewart’s action is time-barred because California law applies, and the California statute of limitations for legal malpractice is one year. Because the one-year limitations periodexpired by no later than June 15, 2006, they contend that this action, which was filed on July 30,Case 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 2 of 9 In addition, Defendant Brown contends that the time by which Plaintiff had to 2commence an action against him was even earlier (May 17, 2006) because he withdrew from representing Plaintiff on May 18, 2005 due to his hospitalization for a heart attack.32007, is time-barred. Next, they argue that even if the action is not time-barred, Utah is thewrong venue because all Defendants reside in California, New Jersey, or Washington–and all thepertinent events occurred in Los Angeles. Thus, Defendants contend, this action should either be dismissed for improper venue or transferred to Los Angeles.Ms. Stewart, on the other hand, argues that Utah law applies to this action, and Utah’s statute of limitations for legal malpractice is four years, thus rendering this action timely. Ms.Stewart also contends that venue is proper in Utah because a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claims in this action occurred in Utah. Therefore, she urges thecourt to deny all the motions.

DISCUSSION:

WAS THE INSTANT ACTION TIMELY FILED?
The question of whether the action is time-barred hinges on which state’s law applies. If California law applies, the action is time barred, but if Utah law applies, the action was timely filed. Defendants contend that courts should look to the law where the harm occurred, which,they claim, is in California. They contend that Ms. Stewart filed her lawsuit in California, theattorneys were all admitted (or were granted permission ) to practice in the Central District ofCalifornia, and the “harmful conduct,” which they characterize as the dismissal of the action,occurred in California. 2Case 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 3 of 94Ms. Stewart, on the other hand, argues that Utah’s four-year statute of limitations appliesin this case. She retained Defendants at various times beginning in 2004, and all events relevantto her claims in the Infringement Action occurred between 2004 and 2006. The instant action was filed in August 2007, within the four-year limitations period. Thus, according to Ms.Stewart, Defendants' motions to dismiss pursuant to F.R.C.P. 12(b)(6) must be denied.A federal court sitting in a diversity action follows the procedural law of the forum state,regardless of whether the court applies the substantive law of the forum state or another state.Rocky Mountain Helicopters, Inc. v. Bell Helicopter Texatron, Inc., 24 F.3d 125, 128 (10 Cir. th1994). Utah follows the traditional rule that "statutes of limitation are essentially procedural innature," and that "under a general conflicts of law analysis, the limitations period of the forum applies." Records v. Briggs, 887 P.2d 864, 870 (Utah Ct. App. 1994) (citing Lee v. Gaufin, 867P.2d 572, 575 (Utah 1993), Jackett v. Los Angeles Dep't of Water & Power, 771 P.2d 1074,1075-76 (Utah Ct. App. 1989), and Pan Energy v. Martin, 813 P.2d 1142, 1145-46 (Utah 1991));see also Sun Oil Co. v. Wortmann, 486 U.S. 717 (1988) (application of the forum state's statutesof limitation is consistent with the traditional view that such statutes are procedural and is consistent with the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution); Fin. Bancorp, Inc. v.Pingree & Dahle, Inc., 880 P.2d 14, 16 (Utah Ct. App. 1993) (Utah follows the majority position that limitation periods are generally procedural in nature, and thus, Utah’s statutes of limitationapply to actions brought in Utah.”).Accordingly, in the instant action, this court applies Utah’s limitations period for legal malpractice claims. Because Utah law provides a four-year limitations period, Plaintiff’s actionCase 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 4 of 95is not time-barred.

IS VENUE PROPER IN UTAH?
Next, Defendants argue that venue is improper in Utah, and thus the action should bedismissed or transferred. Defendants conclusorily argue that all the substantial events took place in California and that none of the Defendants lives in Utah. In contrast, Ms. Stewart argues that venue is appropriate in Utah because a substantial part of the events and/or omissions giving riseto her claim occurred here. Under 28 U.S.C. 1391(a)(2), venue in diversity cases is proper in any judicial districtwhere “a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred.” This language has been interpreted to allow for the fact that a substantial part of the events may haveoccurred in more than one district and “venue may be proper even if contacts with another district were more substantial.” Mohr v. Margolis, Ainswoth & Kinlaw Consulting, Inc., 434 F.Supp. 2d 1051 (D. Kan. 2006).

Federal district courts have held that the "substantial part" requirement of Section1392(a)(2) is satisfied where the plaintiff resides in the forum state and the defendants havecontacts with plaintiff in the forum state related to the subject of the action. In Furr v. Aguilar, the District Court for the District of Colorado, the court considered a motion to dismiss forimproper venue in a case involving claims by a Colorado resident against a California law firm,which had defended the Colorado resident in an action in California state court. Furr, 2005 WL1801627 (D. Colo. July 28, 2005) (unpublished decision). The court noted that the law firm'snormal duties in representing the Colorado resident included informing him of the status of theCase 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 5 of 96case, any offers to settle and other matters raised in the action. The court also found that such correspondence occurred via telephone from the law firm's offices in California, and that the attorney-client relationship was established with a resident of Colorado. Based on thesecontacts, which were related to the malpractice claims at issue, the court concluded that theplaintiff had demonstrated that a substantial part of the relevant events had occurred in Colorado,and denied defendants' motion to dismiss.In Stein v. Stein, the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas held that plaintiffs, whowere residents of Kansas, met their burden of demonstrating proper venue under Section1391(a)(2). Stein, 184 Fed. Appx. 808, 2006 WL 1892580 (D. Kan. July 11, 2006) (unpublisheddecision). In that case, plaintiffs, who were residents of Kansas, sued Washington residents anda Washington LLC for breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment, breach of duty of good faithand fair dealing, and breach of fiduciary duty. The plaintiffs alleged that they had contractedwith defendants to make an equity investment in the LLC's business enterprise, and based on thatalleged contract plaintiffs had obtained a line of credit from a Kansas bank for the benefit of thedefendants. The court found that the alleged contract was sent to plaintiffs in Kansas, plaintiffsperformed their part of the alleged contract in this state, and any of the alleged fraudulentrepresentations were made via facsimile, e-mail or in person to plaintiffs in Kansas. Thus,Kansas was an appropriate venue under Section 1391(a)(2).In this case, Plaintiff has set forth sufficient allegations to demonstrate that Utah is aproper venue under Section 1392(a)(2).
Plaintiff is a Utah resident. (First Amended Complaintat ¶ 1). She was contacted by each of Defendants at her residence in Utah, and agreed to retainCase 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 6 of 97each in Utah. (Aff. of Sophia Stewart at ¶¶ 3-6, 9-10). She executed an engagement letter withMessrs. Lubell, Brown, and Webb in Utah. (Id. ¶ 6). She had telephone conversations andcorresponded with each of the Defendants from Utah. (Id. ¶ 7, 11, 14, 17).
Plaintiff did not attend any hearings in California, based on the advice of one or more of the Defendants. (Id. ¶23). Defendants sent her bills for services at her address in Utah. (Id. ¶ 22). These contactswere over the course of the Infringement Action, from the spring of 2004 through summer 2006.(Id. ¶ 3-23). Like the plaintiffs in Furr, Plaintiff has brought this action against her formerattorneys for malpractice, who purposefully and regularly directed their contacts toward a Utah resident when they were retained and throughout their handling of the Infringement Action. Like the plaintiffs in Stein, Plaintiff contends that she complied with her obligations with respect tothe attorney-client relationship and the prosecution of the Infringement Action in Utah. Thus,the court finds that these contacts were sufficient to qualify as a "substantial part" of the actionsand omissions giving rise to Plaintiff's claims, and thereby satisfy the requirements for venue in Utah under Section 1391(a)(2).

SHOULD THE CASE BE TRANSFERRED?
Defendants again conclusorily argue that the court should transfer the case to the CentralDistrict of California. Plaintiff contends that Defendants have failed to meet their burden ofdemonstrating that this action should be transferred. In considering whether to transfer venue, acourt considers the following factors: a plaintiff's choice of forum; the accessibility of witnessesand other sources of proof, including the availability of compulsory process to insure attendanceof witnesses; the cost of making the necessary proof; questions as to the enforceability of aCase 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 7 of 98judgment if one is obtained; relative advantages and obstacles to a fair trial; difficulties that mayarise from congested dockets; the possibility of the existence of questions arising in the area ofconflict of laws; the advantage of having a local court determine questions of local law; and, allother considerations of a practical nature that make a trial easy, expeditious and economical.Chrysler Credit Corp. v. Country Chrysler, Inc., 928 F.2d 1509, 1516 (10th Cir. 1991) (quotingTex. Gulf Sulphur Co. v. Ritter, 371 F.2d 145, 147 (10th Cir. 1967)). A court must give greatweight to plaintiff's choice of forum. KCJ Corp. v. Kinetic Concepts, Inc., 18 F. Supp. 2d 1212,1214 (D. Kan. 1998). Unless the balance strongly favors the movant, plaintiff's forum choiceshould rarely be disturbed. Scheidt, 956 F.2d at 965. "Merely shifting the inconvenience from one side to the other . . . is not a permissible justification for a change of venue.” Id. at 966. Inexercising its discretion, “the Court must ‘adjudicate motions for transfer according to an‘individualized, case-by-case consideration of convenience and fairness.’” Chrysler, 928 F.2d at1516 (quoting Stewart Org. v. Ricoh Corp., 487 U.S. 22, 29 (1988)).In addition, the party moving to transfer a case pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) bears theburden of establishing that the existing forum is inconvenient. Chrysler Credit Corp. v. CountryChrysler, Inc., 928 F.2d 1509, 1515 (10 Cir. 1991). Defendants have failed to carry their thburden in this case. Given the weight assigned to Plaintiff’s choice of forum, the fact that atleast some of the Defendants would have to travel in any event, and the other factors that a court considers, Defendants simply have failed to demonstrated that the action should be transferred to California.Case 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 8 of 99
CONCLUSION:
Accordingly, for the foregoing reasons, (1) Defendant Gary S. Brown’s Motion toDismiss (docket # 14) is DENIED and his Motion to Change Venue to the Central District of LosAngeles, CA (docket # 15) is DENIED; (2) Defendant Dean Webb’s Motion to Dismiss (docket# 18) is DENIED and his Alternative Motion to Change Venue (docket # 26) is DENIED; (3)Defendant Michael T. Stoller’s Motion to Dismiss (docket # 20) is DENIED and his Motion toChange Venue (by joining in other Defendants’ motions) is DENIED; (4) Defendant JonathonLubell’s Motion to Dismiss (docket #21) is DENIED, and his Motion to Change Venue (docket# 22) is DENIED. Defendants are directed to file an Answer to the Complaint by no later thanSeptember 23, 2008. DATED this 28 day of August, 2008. thBY THE COURT:DALE A. KIMBALLUnited States District JudgeCase 2:07-cv-00552-DAK Document 35 Filed 08/28/2008 Page 9 of 9

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FRAUD REOPENS THE MATRIX CASE

In 1981-83 an Epic sci-fi story was written by Sophia Stewart Titled "THE THIRD EYE". It is an epic science fiction work with Biblical subliminization. This body of work was copy righted by the Library of Congress. The book is out now, that tells a story within a story. The Book was written for the Matrix fans and the People who want to know the TRUTH about the Matrix, Terminator and The Woman who created this great body of work, So take the Red pill and stay in wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

FRAUD REOPENS THE MATRIX CASE.

Screenplay writer Stewart, better known as Mother of the Matrix and author of the book the Third Eye, will soon be releasing her own version of the continuation of the series. The Matrix which was released in 1999 , which starred actors Kenau Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie Ann Moss was listed as one of the most successful box office hits in the history of the movie industry. Also, the movie featured the successful digital innovation that revolutionized cyber, techno, cinematography, special effects and was a first of it’s kind to do so, with much of the credit given to the original writer, Sophia Stewart .

2010-02-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

Blacks Face Senate Shutout in 2011

That historically all-white club known as the U.S. Senate is likely to lose what little diversity it has after November's elections.

The Senate will be as white as Washington,DC and the White House during the blizzard of February 2010. All-white is alright in the U. S. Senate.

Two white men will be competing for President Obama's former Senate seat from Illinois, now held by Roland W. Burris, the chamber's lone Black member. Appointed by a scandal-tainted governor, Mr. Burris won't be seeking a full term.

In contests in Florida, Texas and North Carolina, Black candidates face daunting uphill battles to join the august body. They are having difficulties raising cash and building name recognition against better-known, better-financed rivals.

Blacks constitute 12.2 percent of the nation's population, but not in the 100-member Senate. Come next year, the total number could be zero.

"It certainly is not a desirable state of affairs," said David Bositis, a senior political analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Mr. Bositis noted that Blacks don't make up the majority population in any state. In states with large Black populations, as in the South, racial divisions make election difficult, he said.

Florida, for example, is more likely to produce the next Hispanic senator in November than it is to elect the next Black senator.

Former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, is locked in a close race with Gov. Charlie Crist for the Republican Senate nomination and the chance to succeed Cuban-born Mel Martinez, a Republican who left the Senate before his term ended. Sen. Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat, who was elected in 2006, is the Senate's only Hispanic member and is one of six Hispanics elected since the 1920s.

Rep. Kendrick Meek, one of 41 Blacks in the House, is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in Florida, but polls show him trailing both Mr. Rubio and Mr. Crist in the general election.

In Texas, Republican Michael Williams is weighing a run for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's seat. Mrs. Hutchison is resigning her seat to challenge fellow Republican Gov. Rick Perry. Mr. Williams is a member of the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industries in the state.

In North Carolina, Chapel Hill lawyer Kenneth Lewis, a former state fundraiser for President Obama, is one of three leading Democrats seeking to challenge Republican incumbent Sen. Richard Burr. Another Black Democrat, Nathaniel Cooper, has raised just $1,600 to compete in the May 4 Democratic primary.

In Georgia, former Rockdale County Chief of Staff R.J. Hadley, a first-time candidate, hopes to take on Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican, but has not raised the minimum $5,000 filing fee.

Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University political science and law professor, said that party leaders need to be committed to a diversified legislative body and that qualified Black candidates with money must step up to seek office.

"One of the reasons why it's difficult for minorities, especially Blacks, to win statewide is the cost of campaigns," she said. "It takes millions of dollars to run a Senate campaign."

On Tuesday, neither of the two Black challengers in the Senate primary in Illinois -- Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Jackson, a Democrat, and little-known former suburban Chicago Alderman John Arrington, a Republican, --could compete against the better-funded and better-known candidates who captured the major-party nominations.

Five-term Rep. Mark Steven Kirk won the Republican nomination, and Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias claimed the Democratic nod. Both men are white.

Illinois has sent three of the nation's four Black senators to Washington in modern times.

The first Black senator in the 20th century was Edward W. Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican who served from 1967 until 1979. The first to hold the seat from Illinois was Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat who won it in 1992. She lost her seat six years later to Republican Peter Fitzgerald, who is white and didn't seek a second term. Mr. Obama captured the seat in 2004 by trouncing another Black candidate, conservative Republican Alan Keyes. Mr. Obama relinquished the seat when he was elected president, and it was filled by Mr. Burris.

Mr. Burris was appointed by then-Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich after the Democratic governor was arrested on charges of trying to sell Mr. Obama's seat. Mr. Burris won the battle to be seated, despite resistance from Senate Democratic leaders, in part because of strong support from members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC

2009-11-25T14:10:00.000-08:00

COAST GUARD ACADEMY FACES HISTORIC OVERHALL IN ADMISSIONS CRITERIA.

Eight years after the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and the NAACP signed a voluntary agreement to work together to boost the number of African-Americans at its 1,000-cadet Coast Guard Academy (CGA), the annual enrollment and graduation figures for Blacks remain in single digits.

Seven Blacks graduated from CGA in New London, Conn., in the Class of 2001, the year the agreement was signed.

The same number graduated from the Class of 2006, the first class for which Blacks were recruited under the agreement.

Subsequently, there were seven Black graduates in the Class of 2007, five in the Class of 2008 and four in the Class of 2009.

That makes 23 graduates in four years under the agreement, including CGA's first Black female valedictorian. In the four previous years the number was 33.

Leading lawmakers have grown increasingly upset with results even as they repeatedly are told the USCG is working hard to improve diversity in a service where only 311 of its 6,787 commissioned officers are Black.

There is only one Black admiral, Admiral Manson K. Brown, who graduated in the Class of 1978.

"The Coast Guard has just not paid attention to it. It is not antipathy or animosity toward it," said Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Transportation Committee. "I think we're moving in the right direction and got the Coast Guard's attention and we're not going to let up."

Under a House bill, sponsored by Oberstar and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the Coast Guard subcommittee chairman, members of Congress would nominate candidates for the academy. All the other service academies have long used congressional nominations.

On a 385-11 vote last month, the House advanced the legislation to the Senate.

The Coast Guard Academy historically has taken pride in viewing itself merit-based and choosing its applicants without regard to their geographical distribution among the states. As a result many areas of the country are unrepresented in the USCG officer corps. Other areas, such as, New York, California, Texas, and the mid-South have historically been over-represented.

Rep. Cummings, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, expects Black enrollment to grow with congressional involvement, at least in part because the House typically has about 40 Black lawmakers who would be effective recruiters in largely Black congressional districts.

The Coast Guard's position on the bill has been rather subdued. This is to be expected. The USCG is the last bastion of white male supremacy in the U. S. Armed Forces. Also, the USCG officer corps is quickly becoming disproportionately female. About 30% of the cadets at the CGA are females, and mostly white. The Coast Guard Academy, founded in 1876, is the smallest U.S. military academy with an enrollment of about 1000 cadets. Women represent about 30 percent of Coast Guard Academy cadets, compared with less than 20 percent at the Air Force and Naval Academies and about 15 percent at West Point.

The torch has truly been passed to a new gender at CGA. This raises other question of a more practical nature. It raises questions of a safety and seaworthy nature. The nation's oldest continuous seagoing service may find some of its high endurance cutters unseaworthy on long deployments. There are some anatomical factors that the Personnel Assignments branch must take into consideration since the pool of available officers will be disproportionately full of female officers.

This is the big question, can too many female officers in strategic assignments on a vessel or shore unit render it UNSEAWORTHY for 7 days out of 30? It would appear that it is quite possible because of the McClintock Effect. Women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of their menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level. If every female officer on the ship or unit is experiencing the same symptoms at the same time, the unit would be rendered unseaworthy or not fit for full duty. The lives of every member of the crew would be in danger.

The McClintock effect (also known as "Menstrual Synchrony") is the observed phenomenon that the menstrual cycles of women who live together (such as in prisons, convents, bordellos, dormitories, military academies etc.) will tend to become synchronized over time.

The phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the "social regulation of ovulation," was first formally studied by psychologist Martha McClintock, who reported her findings in Nature in 1971. It has also been noted in small animals such as mice and guinea pigs. Females affected will tend to follow the 'lead' of the alpha female.
Since the research on the McClintock effect is inconclusive, many important questions remain, such as why it evolved and how much pheromones and Jacobson's organ play a role. One possible explanation on why it evolved is: because it allows more males to mate and pass their genes. If only one female of the group was ready to mate at a time, the most probable outcome would be that only the more dominant male would have access to her.
It is apparent from research that some women at least synchronize after living together for a time. Yet others, in virtually identical living conditions, do not. (McClintock, Martha K., Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression. Nature. 229: 244-45, 1971.)
Let me attempt to answer a question asked by Gloria Steinam of Ms. Magazine, If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the
beginning of our menstrual cycle, when the female hormone is at its
lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that in those few days
women... (are not fully capable of performing the duties of a ship’s officer or unit commander in a dangerous situation with a very small margin for error?)

According to a Coast Guard Task Force Report completed in 2007 “Women generally outperform their male counterparts in both academic and military requirements”. (The Report, page 39). If that is truly the case, then it is a good thing the Academy is not a regular “Joe College”. The percentage of women in the student body could easily go from 30 percent to 70 or 80 percent using a strictly merit system of admissions. Men would have to seek “affirmative action” in order to gain admission. The Admissions Office would have to consider GENDER as a factor in admissions, along with race, SAT scores, and extra-curricular activities. This is how the Whole-man Concept of recruiting works.

One out of three cadets graduating in the Class of 2007 from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy was a woman, making it the largest class of female cadets to graduate from CGA.

The CGA's superintendent, Rear Adm. J. Scott Burhoe, who is not an Academy graduate himself, likes the existing "merit-based system," but would be "fine" if Congress adopted congressional nominations.

"I think for us part of our fear is the unknown, really, right now," he said in an interview with The Associated Press (AP).

The Coast Guard Academy graduated its first Black officer, Merle James Smith, in the Class of 1966. He is presently an adjunct law professor at the Coast Guard Academy.

There were two Black graduates in the Class of 1968. They were Kenneth Boyd and London Steverson.

(At right, newly commissioned Ensign London Steverson, June 1968)
They are usually referred to as the Kennedy Cadets, because they were recruited in response to a directive from President John F. Kennedy to find and admit qualified Black applicants. There was one Black graduate in the Class of 1970, Willie Pickrum. In the 43 years since 1966, only about 2 percent of CGA's graduates have been Black and only once has there been as many as 10 in a single year.

Two years ago, the academy drew national attention when a noose was found among a Black cadet's personal effects on the CGA's training ship, the USCGC Eagle. That was followed with the appearance of a noose for a white officer who was conducting race relations training at CGA. This was part of the fallout from the court-martial of Webster Smith, the first cadet in Coast Guard history to receive a General court-martial. Webster Smith is Black. His father graduated from CGA in the Class of 1978 along with Admiral Manson K. Brown, the only Black admiral serving in the USCG. Admiral Brown is a strong candidate to become the USCG's first Black Commandant.

Rep. Cummings said at the time that the Coast Guard must redouble its efforts in the face of a clear attempt to threaten and intimidate efforts to increase diversity.

An investigation involving 50 federal agents including the FBI produced no arrests or motives.

At present, CGA reports it has 136 minorities, with 72 Hispanics, 39 Asians and 25 African-Americans.

The USCG and CGA, when asked by The AP how many African-Americans were admitted to CGA as a result of the NAACP memorandum of agreement, said, through spokeswoman LT. Nadine Santiago, that there was no way to know. That is a polite way to say "none", not one.

Lawmakers lashed out at the Coast Guard at a hearing last June for admitting so few Blacks for the 2013 class only months after a previous hearing and discussion about the need to provide for congressional nominations.

"I am shocked that you only have five African Americans entering the class of 2013 and that you only offered two African American students appointments that were coming directly from high school that did not need additional preparation from a preparatory school," Oberstar said. "The Naval Academy found 149 fully qualified African-Americans to attend their Academy."

The U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md.,, accepted 1,328 as cadets for its Class of 2013. For that class, 327 African-Americans applied, with 138 of the 149 blacks deemed fully qualified accepting offers of admission.

The Coast Guard, for its own 2013 Class, offered admission to 411 of 1,672 applicants, with 290 accepting offers. Only 47 Blacks had applied, with seven being offered admission and five accepting. At the same time, 26 Hispanics and five Asian-Americans accepted admission.

"We are able to attract the cream of the crop, but more importantly, the Coast Guard has the ability to select applicants which meet its demands," Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., a Coast Guard veteran, said of the current admissions system "This could continue with a direct nomination process, but it injects a component that removes the academy from the equation."

The Coast Guard must graduate 70 percent of its cadets in science, math and technological fields. For the 2013 Class, the average SAT math and verbal scores totaled 1240, with the average GPA a 3.8, and half of the students were in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Using the present admission's criteria, many cadets are quick to point out that they made it into the CGA own their own without any help from anyone. Some Black cadets are foolish enough to say "I got here all by myself, own my own merit. I am not an affirmative action baby". Little do they realize how the admission's criteria and their records are massaged and weighted to arrive at their final score. The CGA has always referred to this as the "wholeman concept" of recruiting. The Admission's Office weighs certain things, such as, community involvement, athletic achievement, extra curricular activities, and musical or speaking skills along with who your parents are, before they arrive at that final magic number that determines the place of each applicant in the pecking order for an appointment.

Some cadets, like Cadet First Class Jacqueline Fitch, 21, Catonsville, Md., who recently became the academy's first Black woman to be named a regimental commander are quick to spout the party line. She wonders about making a change to congressional nominations.

"I know when I applied for the Coast Guard Academy one of the things that made me really proud is that I got into the academy off of my own merit," she said, explaining she was initially rejected and first had to go prep school. "I had to work really hard to get to the academy."

Hilary Shelton, the NAACP's senior vice president for advocacy and policy, said the Coast Guard asked to enter into their nonbinding memorandum of agreement in 2001 after the Coast Guard recognized its record in recruiting Blacks was dismal. Eight years later, he acknowledged that the current Black enrollment figures are "sad and unfortunate."

He was unsure about the use of congressional nominations as a solution. He said adding another step in the selection process could be "stifling" for recruitment.

"I am convinced that we probably need to do a thorough assessment of what we've done thus far and find ways of actually making it more robust," he added. "You need to work with community-based organizations like the NAACP to make sure that this great opportunity is there for them and indeed they can be successful."

There was a time when the USCG was serious about recruiting Black applicants for the CGA. In July 1972 LTJG London Steverson was reassigned from Alaska to Washington, D.C. to become the Chief of the newly formed Minority Recruiting Section at USCG Headquarters. He traveled the country looking for qualified minority high school students who could compete for admission. His efforts were rewarded in 1973 when 28 Black cadets were sworn into the Class of 1977, and again in 1974 when 20 Black cadets were admitted as part of the Class of 1978. When Steverson's efforts proved to be successful, the USCG expressed doubts about being able to absorb so many Black cadets in such a short time into the previously all-white CGA. Steverson was marginalized. His efforts were hampered. His supervisor attempted to give him an adverse fitness report. Eventually, he was transferred.

(LT Steverson, and LTJG Thorn with the Black cadets in the Class of 1978, including ADM Manson K. Brown, and Cleon Smith, the father of Webster Smith.)

2009-08-06T03:39:00.000-07:00

The STEVERSON COLLECTION Book Club is for book lovers.
(Find the Steverson Collection at www.ekmk.hu)
After the Opening Ceremony of the Steverson Book Collection on 23 April, 2009 the American Corner Veszprem was excited to announce the start of the
Steverson Collection Book Club. The Club aims to give the reading public a chance to get acquainted with the vast collection of books in the generous donation from Judge London Steverson and his family. This Book Club will be run by booklovers, for booklovers. The members will be at the heart of all the club does.

Variety will be at the heart of The Club. The Steverson Collection contains thousands of used and rare English language books on a variety of subjects of interest; such as, History, Humor, Satire, Myths & Legends, Philosophy, Poetry, Shakespeare, Religion, Reference, Travel & Leisure, Exploration (The Silk Road, The Spice Route, The Northwest Passage, Anrarctica, The North Pole, and more...)

We read books for what’s inside them, but there’s something inexpressibly pleasurable about the look, touch, even the smell, of a beautiful book. One can never hope to experience such pure pleasure from reading a book on-line. A electronic page-turner has its advantages, but not such a pleasure as this one.
That’s why The Steverson Collection Book Club exists, to make available beautiful editions of the world’s greatest books… and we have a passion for what we do.

(Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Ambassador April Foley, and Judge London Steverson.)

GREAT AFRICAN AMERICANS.
These talented men and women of color challenged misconceptions and rewrote history. They blazed trails,brokered power,pioneered medical procedures,hurdled barriers, and created musical and literary masterpieces. Theire stories are stories of courage and sacrifice, of struggles and victories, or triumphs and tragedies. Their struggles inspired Senator Barack H. Obama to seek the Presidency of the United States and their struggles will inspire tomorrow's heroes. Their history is an integral part of American History. It is American History.

Thurgood Marshall was the only Black leader in America during the
Civil Rights era who could say that he defeated segregation where it really counted; that was, in the courts. He legal strategy was based on the U. S. Constitution.

Steverson Collection at www.ekmk.hu

THE OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH DETECTIVE STORIES. A collection of 33 stories that show the scope, vigour, and enduring facination of the detective story is here edited by Patricia Craig. Beginning in the 1089s with the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and continuing to the present with P D James, Michael Gilbert, and Ruth Rendell. Here you have the cream of crime.

An atlas ia an inspirational source of travel and general knowledge at your fingertips.

History as it really happened - Gripping accounts of great events
spanning over 4,000 years. Our story begins with hieroglyphics and
ends with the BlackBerry.

P. D. James mysteries, that include all of her works.
The perfect English country house murder mystery - subtle, intelligent
and gripping to the very end, Cover Her Face is an outstanding
contribution to the genre by one of its greatest practitioners.

By concentrating on the actions and experiences of soldiers rather
than on the strategies of generals, The History of VietNam War, WWII, and
other Time-Life series revolutionised our understanding of the nature
of combat. At its heart are reconstructions of the battles of
Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme; Viet Nam, Desert Storm, and others.

Fifty Days That Changed the World ( Ten Days/JFK/ Cuban missile
crisis, etc) unravels the causes and consequences of the most
significant days in history, revealing how each one left its imprint
on the course of future events.

Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Motown, Diana Ross, etc This magisterial study
encompasses four millennia of musical achievement, beginning with the
temple songs of ancient Mesopotamia and concluding with the revolution
caused by modern mass communications.

Graham Greene's 22nd novel is a return to the Cold War territory he explored
in The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana. With typical aplomb, he
creates a shadowy world with very human characters who, if difficult
to love, are never easy to condemn.

Today, East Berlin's Alexanderplatz is a sprawling mass of concrete featuring acres of chain stores, neon signs, billboards advertising toothpaste and an endless stream of cars. Amidst it all, a big statue of Karl Marx casts a disappointed eye over what remains of his legacy.

It's hard to believe this drab expanse of East German architecture was once the physical and emotional heart of the city.

Return to those thrilling days of yesteryear with John LaCarre's novels and Robert Littell's THE COMPANY, A Novel of the CIA.

ADOLF HITLER. Much has been written about Hitler, yet he remains a creature of legend, myth, and misconceptions. the books in this collection will paint a picture of Hitler- as man, politician, and military leader,- more complex and comprehensive than any ever published.
Mein Kampf- Hitler's blueprint to the age of chaos. Translated by Ralph Manheim. As Thomas Mann said "It is supremely difficult to translate Hitler's German into English that is readable, but Mr Manheim ahs done an excellent job." In 1933 two publishers realized the historical importance of this book. they were Houghton Mifflin and Hurst & Blackett. It did not become a best seller until 1942. It must be read and constantly remembered as a specimen of the demagoguery that people can believe and that always menaces the world when men grow tired of thinking for themselves.

Novels, love stories, Sidney Shelton, Judith Krantz, etc are
intoxicating stories of passion and loss, adventure and intrigue, vast in scope and peopled by memorable personalities, evocatively illustrated with period
photographs.

Intrepid's Last Case chronicles the post-WWII activities of Sir William Stephenson, whose facinating role in helping to defeat the Nazis was the subject of the best seller A Man Called Intrepid.

Ken Follett writes a breathtaking best seller surrounding the days before the Normandy Invasion. Set in England and occupied France, the female Secret Agent, code named Leopardess, leads an assault on a German communications center with an all female team of daredevils.

A great first novel by Ivana Trump, former wife of Donald Trump.
Ivana is vibrant, passionate and no stranger to the caprices of romance. she writes of a woman of charm and courage whose life surpasses even her own grandest fantasies.

An explosive insiders look at Bill Clinton and Hollywood beauties by
Joe Esterhaus, a Hungarian writer in America.

Where does language come from? How does it evolve? Why is a 3-year-old
child a grammatical genius? These are some of the questions to which
Steven Pinker turns his dazzling insight and expertise.
(Find out in the book The History of Writing; Man and His Symbols,...)

GOETHE'S FAUST. A parallel translation of German and English, with an introduction by WalterKaufmann. Both in poetic beauty and in comprehension from the original, this is one of the best translations ever of Faust.

Tsars and maidens, witches and wizards, enchanted castles and vampire
lairs, orphans and fools, sorceresses and talking animals: these are
the stuff of Russian legend.

Books that chronicle of the great American West, the Great War Chiefs, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, cowboys and indians, and The Oregon Trail remain very popular.

"The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe.
Tom Wolfe’s modern classic tells the thrilling story of the United
States’ pioneering space missions. Alan Shephard, Charles Yeager and
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The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire chronicles the final years of
the ancient Roman Republic and the rise to power of Octavian, who
emerged from the chaos to become ruler of the world.

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Pope John Paul II- Widely regarded as the best single-volume account
of the papacy, charts the 2,000 year history of one the most powerful
institutions in the world.

Delbert, Art Buchwald, et al A product of a golden age of political
and literary humour, a rare combination of elegance and comic oddity
reminiscent of Saki and Wilde.

Art books, eg, Florence: birthplace and crowning glory of the Italian
Renaissance. From the grandeur of the Duomo to the marble of the
Medici chapel, from Giotto's frescoes to Michaelangelo's David - what
other city can compare, what other age compete with this one
miraculous flowering of genius?

An art history book with a difference - explore image-making from
prehistoric times to today.
A magnificent collection that reveals Leonardo´s brilliance and
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peoccupations and eccentricities.

With clear descriptions providing in-depth analysis, a variety of dictionaries
that are invaluable for students and professionals, and provide a
fascinating wealth of information for the general reader.
With almost 3,500 A-Z entries ranging across painting, sculpture,
drawing and the applied arts from classical times to the present day,
it provides the reader with information in succinct and readable form
about styles, techniques, collections, artists and critics.

BIOGRAPHIES that capture --Bogart, Bacal, Gabor, Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Princess Di, Nelson Mandella, Rock Hudson, Ronald Raegan, Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Alexander Haig, Marilynn Monroe, Princess Grace, MAO, Stalin, Lenin, Gorbachev, Ribbentrop and many more..

Casanova’s most formative and brilliant adventures to provide the highlights of one of the most entertaining autobiographies ever written.

A definitive work on William Blake.

Comprehensive and authoritative biographical books, covering all areas of human achievement across
the arts, science, technology, sport, politics, philosophy and
business.
Winston Churchill describes his military adventures with
enormous zest, but also paints a poignant picture of life before the
First World War, etc
For those who know Churchill only in his later years as a dignified
statesman, our books tell the story of his early life. describes his military adventures with enormous zest, but also paints a poignant picture of life before the
First World War.

For more than two years, Anne Frank and the Franks and another Jewish
family lived like ghosts in a cramped set of rooms at the back of an
office building in Amsterdam.
John Adams--John Adams - revolutionist, political theorist. One of
five acclaimed biographies of America's Founding Fathers .
Benjamin Franklin, the unrivalled polymath and intellectual architect
of so many revolutionary ideas.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.
George Washington, commander-in-chief of the army and America's first
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Camp Pastor---On arriving at Auschwitz in February 1944, more than 500 of his fellow deportees were sent straight to the gas chambers, but
this preacher was one of the 'lucky' ones.
Schindler's List tells one of the most amazing stories to come out of the horrors of the Second World War. How a womanising, heavy drinking Nazi industrialist turned into the saviour of over 1,000 Jews is a tale that needs no embellishment.

In her correspondence as in her novels, Jane Austen's voice is
unmistakable. Witty and observant, intimate and gossipy.
Steverson Collection at www.ekmk.hu

This is a unique book. A first of its kind filling a gap that has existed for decades. Finally here it is for both new and experienced parents. Early on many find it a challenge to provide foods that are healthy and nutritious for their children. Even if one succeeds, continuing to feed children a wide variety healthy foods filled with vitamins and minerals is a difficult task. Neglect of this part of parenting has resulted in many cases of overweight but under nourished children. This book is a valuable aid to aid parents, new or experienced. It will assist parents in putting healthy and nutritious foods on the children's plates three times a day. This book recommends meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner for three weeks. Initially it is recommended that the book be followed. Later, as different recipes are mastered, it is suggested that the parent vary the meals according to their own preferences.
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The Rules of Power.
1. Never outshine the master.
Always make those above you feel confortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite; i.e., inspire insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

2. Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies.
3. Conceal your intentions.
4. Always say less than necessary.
5. So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life.
6.Court attention at all costs.
7. Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.
8. Make others come to you. Use bait if necessary.
9. Win through your actions, never through argument.
10.Infection. Avoid the unhappy and unlucky.
11. Learn to keep people dependent on you.
12. Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim.
13. When asking for help, appeal to peoples' self-interest, never totheir mercy or gratitude.
14. Pose as a friend; work as a spy.
15. Crush your enemy totally.
16. Use absence to increase respect and honor.
17. Keep others in suspended terror: Cultivate an aire of unpredictability.
18. Do not build fortresses to protect yourself. Isolation is dangerous.
19. Know who you are dealing with; do not offend the wrong person.
20. Do not committ to anyone.
21. Play a sucker to catch a sucker. Seem dumber than your mark.
22. Use the surrender tactic. transform weakness into power.
23. Concentrate your forces.
24. Play the perfect courtier.
25. Re-create yourself.
26. Keep your hands clean.
27. Play on people's need to believe to create a cultlike following.
28. Enter action with boldness.
29. Plan all the way to the end.
30. Make your accomplishments seem effortless.
31. Control the options. Get others to play with the cards you deal.
32. Play to people's fantasies.
33. Discover each person's thumbscrew.
34. Be royal in your own fashion. Act like a king to be treated like one.
35. Master the art of timing.
36. Disdain things you cannot have. Ignoring them is the best revenge.
37. Create compelling spectacles.
38. Think as you like, but behave like others.
39. Stir up waters to catch fish.
40. Despise the free lunch.
41. Avoid stepping into a great man's shoes.
42. Strike the shepard and the sheep will scatter.
43. Work on the hearts and minds of others.
44. Disarm and infuriate with the mirror effect.
45. Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.
46. Never appear too perfect.
47. Do not go past the mark you aimed for. In victory, learn when to stop.
48. Assume forlessness.
49. Thank God; count your blessings.

Steverson Collection at www.ekmk.hu

2009-07-30T05:48:00.000-07:00

I NEVER SAID HE WAS BLACK!
Lucia Whalen, the 911 Caller in the Prof Henry Louis Gates arrest case, said she thought one of the men might be Hispanic.
The woman whose 911 call set in motion the events that led to the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates did not tell police during the call that the two men she saw forcing their way into a house were Black.
Her account of the incident, provided by her attorney, differs from a report written by the Police officer Crowley who arrested Gates. Officer Crowley's report said the witness told him at the scene the men were Black. The woman's lawyer denies that.

In a recording of the 911 call released Monday 28 July by police in Cambridge, Mass., Lucia Whalen said she could not see the men clearly. She said one man might be Hispanic.

According to the 911 call, Whalen wasn't sure a crime was taking place. She told a dispatcher she saw suitcases and didn't know whether the men lived in the house.

"I don't know what's happening," Whalen said. Several times during the 21/2-minute call, she said she made the call for an older woman who lives in the neighborhood and was worried when she saw two men trying to barge into the house.

Whalen, who works near Gates' home and was on her way to lunch when the incident occurred, spoke about it Monday through her lawyer, Wendy Murphy. According to Murphy, Whalen said officers did not interview her at the scene, she never said the men at the house were Black, and the only thing she told Crowley was that she was the 911 caller.

The release of the tape and a recording of subsequent police radio transmissions provided more details about the incident that has ignited a debate about race and racial profiling by police. The tapes do not explain how a routine call about a possible burglary led to Gates' arrest at home on a charge of disorderly conduct.

2009-07-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

Is America a color-blind society after the election of Barack Obama?
My first reaction to watching the unfolding Saga of Skip Gates's Cambridge Arrest was that America's postracial bubble, like its recent economic troubles, was about to pop. The fact that some observers had never bought into the story of a race-free America purged of its past sins by a watershed presidential election had done little to diminish either that narrative's moral resonance or political weight.

Since America's racial disparities remain as deep-rooted after Barack Obama's election as they were before, it was only a matter of time until the myth of post-racism exploded in our collective national face. That they would rear their ugly head in the form of an intellectual and racial cause célèbre is fitting, since Black scholars and activists have been engaged in a robust debate over the meaning of race in the Age of Obama.

Suddenly Obama's recent declaration before the NAACP—that American Blacks have come farther than at any other time in our country's history—seems suspect, our national progress undone by the fact that Gates's predicament has become a metaphor for the nation's legacy of racial discrimination.

Our euphoria over Obama's historic election as the nation's first Black president hit an unexpected speed bump in Cambridge, Mass., home to the bastion of academic decorum, of all places. The arrest on July 16 of Doctor Henry Louis Gates,the prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, in his own home has sparked a media firestorm that has interrupted the growing national consensus that America has been writing a new chapter in its tortured racial history.

Fresh from filming his latest PBS documentary in China, the 58-year-old Professor Gates found himself locked out of his well-appointed Harvard home. With the help of his African-American taxi driver, Gates successfully entered his house—but not before arousing a suspicious neighbor, who phoned the police. What happened next is the subject of competing accounts.

The police report characterizes Professor Gates as an academic turned thug: loud, rude, uncooperative, and menacingly dangerous after being asked to produce identification. Gates has countered with an entirely different scenario, one wherein he obligingly showed his Harvard identification only to be met with rude behavior. After asking for and being refused the officer's badge number, Gates was arrested. Why several police officers were needed to secure a nearly 60-year-old man who relies on a cane to get around is one of many questions asked in ensuing days.

Like a bright, streaking comet, Gates's arrest has made its way around blogs, newspaper columns, Web sites, TV shows, Twitter, and via good old-fashioned word of mouth. Not long after the 20th anniversary of the release of Spike Lee's controversial and racially charged film, Do the Right Thing, the urbane, Ivy League educated Gates, perhaps the most important and distinguished black academic of his generation, suddenly found himself a graybearded stand-in for Lee's doomed character Radio Raheem, whose assault by New York City police officers leads to the film's still powerful denouement.

Part of this story's momentum rests with Gates's public persona. Known as a bridge-builder between Black scholars and white liberals, Professor Gates is the pre-eminent scholar-entrepreneur of his generation; one of the architects of a revitalized African-American-studies discipline, who has successfully built networks between academe and business, politics, culture, and the media. If this can happen to Skip Gates, whose investment in the American Dream has carried him to the highest levels of the nation, then what chance does an ordinary Black person stand?

A shaken Gates has publicly expressed outrage and shock about his arrest but found newfound empathy and solidarity with the plight of ordinary Black people, whose encounters with the criminal-justice system rarely end with all charges dropped, as in Gates's case. Nor do they become national and international news stories. Television coverage coincided with Gates's sharing his story on July 22 on CNN's "Black in America 2." Later that evening—at a news conference on health care, where he received a question about the professor's recent arrest—President Obama chimed in to let Gates know he had his back.

The Gates incident illustrates the complex overlap between race and class (a working-class white policeman and one of the country's most celebrated scholars who is Black and now is forced to confront his blackness squarely in the mirror; blog and radio comments that sometimes carry an undercurrent of resentment at the privileged life of this particular Black man). The silver lining to the entire sordid affair is the long-delayed opportunity to draw sustained attention to the interwoven problems of race, structural poverty, and the criminal-justice system—a project that Gates himself has publicly committed to pursue.

The story's race and class dynamics are complicated. Gates is well-connected enough to have the President of the United States refer to him as a friend, yet Black enough to be racially profiled in his own home. The plight of tens of thousands of ordinary Black men and women, sometimes educated, more often not, remains invisible and thus far more vulnerable.

The Gates controversy pulled Obama into his first major racial storm since the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. wrangle. At his news conference, Obama responded that anyone would be angry, the Cambridge police acted "stupidly," and that America had a long history of racial profiling. Police unions expressed disappointment, while civil-rights activists loudly applauded his words. (Obama later said that he "could have calibrated" the wording of his intial reaction differently, and that both Gates and the Cambridge police may have overreacted.)

The arrest may very well be remembered as an unexpected turning point in our national conversation about race. That dialogue, of course, progresses only in fits and starts, occasioned as often by racial turmoil as by racial triumph. President Obama's rise to power elicited genuine excitement and emotion among Americans and citizens of the world about the thrilling possibilities of democracy. It also gave credence to a larger narrative, one supported by the symbolic evidence of Obama's election, that racism was dead. The story was all the more compelling since the vestiges of Jim Crow and lynching are, for many people, something only to be read about in history books or viewed in documentaries.

The story also proved to be dangerous.

An overwhelming number of Black people continue to reside on the margins of society, a permanent underclass seemingly fated to violent and early death, incarceration, poverty, and disease. Inadvertently, the public images of President Obama and, until recently at least, Professor Gates, supported the narrative of a postracial America. After all, how could a country where a Black man can become president and another be one of Harvard's most powerful professors be racist?

Perhaps the final lesson to be learned from all of this, one that Gates himself seemed to acknowledge, is that for all of America's racial progress, and in spite of the very real class divisions within the Black community, race retains stubborn political and social bonds among Black people that require shared affinity, identification, and sacrifice. Even in the Age of Obama (or perhaps especially in the Age of Obama), the struggle for racial and economic justice remains fraught. The Gates incident has become a new metaphor for America's still-tormented racial politics. More than a century ago, the black scholar and civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois explained that African-Americans were too often seen as "problems" to be studied, discarded, lynched, or ignored, but never as full-blooded human beings whose progress remained vital to the success of the nation's democratic experiment. If this controversy helps to spur a national conversation about race and democracy, one that unblinkingly examines the persistence of Black poverty and incarceration even as it exults in Obama's election, then we will at least inch forward on the long road toward racial maturity, where the idea of a postracial American future remains an unrealizable but worthy goal rather than a political fait accompli.

(By Peniel E. Joseph) He is an associate professor of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (Henry Holt and Company, 2006). His new book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, will be published in January by Basic Books.

(Dr. L. Kelly sees this incident from a slightly different perspective.)
There is more than race at work here. There is the identification of much of America (and especially white America) with the police, the military, and any and all symbols of institutionalized authority. I find it most fitting that an African-American male should be in the media limelight for doing nothing more than challenging a cop. We as a country and as a culture are far too deferential to the police. We should routinely ask them to identify themselves and to explain themselves. The nexus between something like a "ruling class" and the police/military establishment is nothing new, nor unique to this culture. It was obviously pervasive in, for example, El Salvador when Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in 1980--but that is only one more high-visibility incident, while many, many more cases go unnoticed or unaddrressed in many cultures. This nexus between police power and economic power is the real problem, and institutionalized racism is only one way that it plays out--although arguably the most insidious and offensive. I say, congratulations to both Gates and Obama for telling it like it is. Obama has no reason to apologize for his comments (and he has not actually retracted them or apologized for them). Gates is to be lauded for his willingness to challenge arbitrary authority, in the same way that he has made a life-long challenge to arbitrary economic and social disparities. It is a shame that only the challenge of a well-known and relatively wealthy African-American male is the one that gets media attention and the interest of an entire culture. This sort of thing happens every day to less advantaged persons of all racial and cultural backgrounds. I have yet to hear the policeman apologize. Perhaps he did. Apologies from authority figures are, in any case, extraordinarily rare. We should all challenge authority and not merely racism. Challenge authority because there is a moral imperative to do so, but do remember the list of martyrs who died because they did precisely that. Institutionalized authority by its nature does not like to be challenged, which is all the more reason that it must be. (Landrum Kelly, Jr., Ph.D. Chair, Department of History and Political Science Livingstone College) (Yes, I am seen as a "white" guy at a "Black" institution, but my forebears were Cherokee and Irish who also knew the force of institutionalized reation against those who were different.)

2009-07-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

Was That Black Enough For Ya?

For a performer who smashed the race barrier on MTV and did as much as
anyone to make black music mainstream — not to mention was accused of
trying to turn himself white through skin treatments and plastic
surgery — the ceremony had a remarkably black cast. John Mayer and
Brooke Shields were the only white celebs with major roles.

Kobe Bryant, Spike Lee, Wesley Snipes, Lou Ferrigno, Don King, the
Kardashian sisters, Brooke Shields, Larry King. While Jackson was
among the most famous faces in the world, today's megastars were
largely absent. Those present mostly reflected some connection to
Jackson's life or work.

Among those conspicuously elsewhere were Elizabeth Taylor, Ross and
Debbie Rowe, Jackson's ex-wife and the mother of Jackson's two oldest
children.

The line spoken by Rev Al Sharpton actually went far beyond the audience assembled at the service and touched a cord -- that America still has not had the conversation on "Race" that it needs, and that statement is true today regardless of who is in the White House. Sharpton said directly to Jackson's children that "Your Daddy wasn't strange -- what was strange was what he had to deal with around him." And that statement brought the house down and the people up almost as a defiant gesture of angry response to all the Michael critics and to members of the general mainstream society that many African-Americans felt just don't understand.

And later that day, CNN's contributor Jeffrey Toobin replied to Sharpton's statement by saying, "Give me a break." And it struck me that the Sharpton statement with the audience response (the most boisterous and prolonged of any response at the service), juxtaposed with the Toobin response serving almost as a "reach out" to mainstream white America to let them know that someone was prepared to go after this saintly image of Michael Jackson being constructed, clearly demonstrated the racial divide that still exists in this country and that President Obama had better find some time to try to address while he still has such high personal approval ratings and political capital in the bank, or we are all in for some big political and social shocks next time around.

As the world paused to remember Jackson, authorities released his death certificate, which did not list a cause of death. The official determination will likely wait until toxicology results are completed, which could be weeks away.

2009-07-06T06:32:00.001-07:00

FIRST BLACK CADETS AT WEST POINT.
In 1870, James Webster Smith became the first African-American admitted to the United States Military Academy. Ironically, the academy's first African American cadet came from South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union and the state with the highest percentage of slaves before the Civil War.

Smith was spared the hazing that was so common among his classmates. He was, rather, completely ostracized by the Corps and, after being turned back (forced to repeat a year) once for academic deficiencies, was dismissed for academic failure after four years at West Point. Smith had broken a critical barrier, however, and in 1873, a Georgian by the name of Henry O. Flipper would benefit.

Henry O. Flipper Flipper was no more popular than Smith, but, in the words of a classmate, “never pushed” the bounds of social equality and so was more easily tolerated. Flipper survived his years at the academy by being as determined as his classmates were prejudiced. In 1877 he became the academy’s first African-American graduate, ranking 50th in a class of 76.
Cadet Smith. James Webster Smith's cadetship was marred by discrimination from his very first day at West Point, When Smith presented his appointment papers to the commandant, he was waved away and several white cadets threatened to resign.

During his four years at West Point he was the center of oontroversy, being tried by court-martial on two occasions, Smith was a pioneer in a hostile environment and suffered dearly as a result.

Cadet O;Flipper, on the other hand, was of a more accommodating nature. Flipper, whose interest in West Point extended back several years before his admission, was aware of' Smith's difficulties through newspaper articles of the day. He went to West Point expecting to be mistreated.

He was mentally prepared for the worst, and when the worst did not occur, felt relieved. He took particular care not to repeat conduct which had caused Smith trouble. The greater majority of this avoided conduct dealt with social equality. Flipper was ostracized socially and, in contrast to Smith, did not complain

For this, he was spared the brutality that Smith had suffered. In modern terminology, Cadet Flipper may have been called an Uncle Tom. Yet, if he had not acquiecsed, he probably would have been forced out as was Smith.

2009-06-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

Up Against The Wall, Michael. Now, Spread 'em!

John McWhorter said he has been telling friends for fifteen years that Michael Jackson would not live past fifty, although he didn't expect to be so precisely on the mark. An overdose, a botched medical procedure, or maybe just something as fortuitous as a car accident.

That is, I sensed nothing as mundane as a death wish or as common as self-destructive tendencies. It just always seemed to me that there was something unreachably and definitively absent about the man. For all of the eclat, there seemed to be nothing actually there - surely, before long he would just blow away.

I was no more immune than anyone else to feeling a loss oddly incommensurate with the fundamental evanescence. I grew up hearing the boy-child version of Michael crooning the Jackson Five's hits in that creamy falsetto, and in college, he helped me cope with the drudgery of my dining hall job as one cut after another from Thriller became a hit and played endlessly on the P.A. system. Almost every song on that album had the precious quality of bearing hundreds of listens - to this day, who in America doesn't jump to the dance floor upon hearing the opening vamp of "Billie Jean"?

Apparently even Iraqis do: the New Yorker told us recently that Michael Jackson is preferred music among Iraqi prisoners. How many other American pop songs of 1983 get them moving? People not born in 1983 can do snippets of the dance Michael did in the marvelous Thriller video. Ever try to do a moonwalk? Even if you got kind of good at it, Michael Jackson doing it can still take your breath away.

In the early eighties there was a good deal of talk about him as the world's greatest entertainer - and it was a rare instance where the hype was more than that. People used to say it about Al Jolson - but the modern viewer is baffled as to what all the fuss was about. They said it about Sammy Davis, Jr. too - and while he holds up better than Jolson, nothing he did makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. With Michael, there was The Voice, The Moves, and a whole somehow greater than the sum of the parts.

The problem was that as he got older, parts seemed to be all there was; the whole became increasingly difficult to perceive. The skin bleaching was strange enough - and his telling Oprah that it was vitiligo and expecting to be believed even stranger. Here was a black man - and one who was a megastar — actually using the kinds of products that look so peculiar and degrading in ancient black newspaper advertisements today. And then the facial surgery, which made him look not only whiter but more feminine.

The question, which he never even ventured an answer to, was why. Who was this personnage supposed to be? White? Gay? Perhaps we were to allow that he was just being "him." But leaving unanswered just who that "him" was supposed to be was, most charitably interpreted, too far ahead of our times. It left him a faintly gruesome cipher.

Or, why the high voice? As males mature their voices deepen: "High Talkers" of the kind depicted in the Seinfeld episode are vanishingly rare. Michael's castrato-style vocal tone was an affectation, more alteration, as it were, although likely one that became so much a habit for him that it was, in essence, him. How many men do you know who talk in a light falsetto 24/7?

One cannot help noticing a possible connection with Jackson's vaunted identification with children and his desire to inhabit the realm of childhood as an adult. And plenty of us are kids at heart - but most of us don't talk like them.

Here we will recall certain unsavory allegations as to how concretely and in what fashion Jackson was interested in connecting with children, especially non-female ones. It is unnecessary to dwell on the issue at this juncture, but what we did know is that he went through decades of adulthood without any outwardly apparent normal romantic relationship with anyone.

His relationships with his wives were rather oddly formal and brief - when Lisa-Marie Presley made sure we knew that their relationship included sexual relations, what was key was that she would feel the need to let us know that.

Never did we see Jackson with her or the other wife cavorting and consorting in the fashion of Brangelina or, in better days, Jon and Kate. These were "wives," not wives - recalling in Michael's earlier days his purportedly "dating" Brooke Shields. Today having become real to us with her memoir of postpartum depression, Shields back then was a rather saliently blank model and sort-of actress - for him, a kind of paper doll, i.e. "date."

Who did Michael Jackson really connect with? He was not one for hanging out with men or women of his age group, for example. Ask most people who Michael Jackson's best friend was and the answer would be Elizabeth Taylor. However, open up your laptop and start with a blank page. Your job is to script a scene between Jackson and Liz Taylor. How would you begin? What in the world did they ever say to each other?

During an interview with Barbara Walters, holding hands with then-wife Presley, Jackson mentioned that his father had sometimes scared him so badly that he regurgitated into his mouth. The childhood was horrific, in a way that would have left most people scarred. Jackson's response was apparently to seek a childhood he never had - but doing so as a grown man can only mean spending your life playing a part, even if you no longer know you're doing it.

It was sad to see. The essence of Michael Jackson as an actual human being was so elusive that it was especially flabbergasting to hear him, when making a public cri de coeur against his prosecution for child molestation, actually referring to something as immediate as an examination of his penis. More typical was his appearance on an early episode of the Simpsons - in the guise of an obese white man — and uncredited. Concealment as always, not really there or of this world, albeit in the world spotlight.

This quality of his was such that his career was likely over long ago. Thriller was perhaps the last moment when hit pop music for people beyond tween-age could be so basically innocent and unprobing of the individual soul. Even back then, part of the charm was the arrangement - his vocal skills acknowledged, Jackson didn't write or orchestrate that opening vamp to "Billie Jean" nor did he create the dense festival of sonic joys under "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),"which are certainly part of the reason I have now purchased Thriller three times.

But even by Bad in 1987, Michael's crotch-grabbing in the video of the title song was a "bad" move indeed. It was fake - looking more like Diana Ross every year, he looked about as plausible taking a page from increasingly popular rappers as Bonnie Raitt would have. It wasn't him - at a time when pop was more and more about exploring the self. As time went by the hit singles were fewer and farther between. "Scream" from the HIStory album in 1995 was the last song of his that got around in any real way.

Six years later when Invincible never really rang the bell in the old way, Jackson interestingly cried racism (against Tommy Mottola). But if anything, the problem was that by then the question as to his own blackness was decidedly abstract. Or at least, he wasn't "real" as it was put by then. By 2001 black rappers were all over the pop charts with cuts about themselves, in da club, in da car, in da hood, in da honeez, all up in dat bizness, whatever - rap is all about the "I" as some more literary-minded aficionados have it.

But "I" is exactly what Michael Jackson never wanted us to see, if he even knew what it was himself. Interestingly, a Michael Jackson circa 1980 would be a smash on American Idol today - but would likely fail to get much of anywhere afterward like Taylor Hicks and Ruben Studdard. Winning over a cross-section spectrum of American call-in voters today requires a certain faceless, generic quality that does not translate into stardom in the real-world market of niches and attitude. Jackson was on his way to becoming a nostalgia act.

Michael Jackson's was an entirely constructed self. The temptation to call this "quintessentially American" in the vein of the story of our President's quest for self-definition must be resisted. The self that Michael Jackson constructed was a mask. Fittingly, Jackson was last officially sighted in public through the window of his van, wearing, as apparently was his custom, a veil over his mouth - i.e. a mask over the mask.

Michelangelo said that when he sculpted the David statue, David was already inside the block of marble and his job was just to take away what was not David. Jackson worked against nature's endowment just as diligently, but surely the pale wraith he became was not something that had been waiting to see the light of day. Rather, what Jackson seemed to find was a negation, a mangling of personhood - what else can we say of someone attending a court date for child molestation in his pajamas? The irony is that despite this man's towering stature as a keystone of American popular music's history, there is surely a part of all of us that sees the man as more fortunate resting in peace. (Jackson: Man Who Wasn't There by John McWhorter)

2009-06-25T15:14:00.003-07:00

Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5 and began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop" in subsequent years, five of his solo studio albums have become some of the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995).

In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African-American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and Thriller—credited for transforming the music video into an art form and a promotional tool—helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s. With stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of physically complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style influenced hip hop, pop and contemporary R&B artists.

Jackson has donated and raised millions of dollars for beneficial causes through his foundation, charity singles and support of 39 charities. Other aspects of his personal life, including his changing appearance and behavior, generated significant controversy, damaging his public image. Though he was accused of child sexual abuse in 1993, the criminal investigation was closed due to lack of evidence and Jackson was not charged. The singer has experienced health concerns since the early 1990s and conflicting reports regarding the state of his finances since the late 1990s. Jackson married twice and fathered three children, all of which caused further controversy. In 2005, Jackson was tried and acquitted of further sexual abuse allegations and several other charges.

One of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, his other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records—including one for "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time"—13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career—more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era—and the sales of over 750 million albums worldwide. Cited as one of the world's most famous men, Jackson's highly publicized personal life, coupled with his successful career, has made him a part of popular culture for almost four decades.

Inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984, Jackson has had a notable impact on music and culture throughout the world. He broke down racial barriers, transformed the art of the music video and paved the way for modern pop music in his own country. Jackson's work, distinctive musical sound and vocal style have influenced hip hop, pop and R&B artists, including Mariah Carey, Usher,Britney Spears,Justin Timberlake and R. Kelly.For much of his career, he had an "unparalleled" level of worldwide influence over the younger generation through his musical and humanitarian contributions.

Throughout his career he received numerous honors and awards, including the World Music Awards' Best-Selling Pop Male Artist of the Millennium, the American Music Award's Artist of the Century Award and the Bambi Pop Artist of the Millennium Award. He is a double-inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, once as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1997 and later as a solo artist in 2001. Jackson was also an inductee of the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002. His awards include multiple Guinness World Records (eight in 2006 alone), 13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career—more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era—and the sale of over 750 million albums worldwide, making him the world's best selling male pop artist.

Queues for a Michael Jackson concert in Berlin in June 1988.He is characterized as "an unstoppable juggernaut, possessed of all the tools to dominate the charts seemingly at will: an instantly identifiable voice, eye-popping dance moves, stunning musical versatility and loads of sheer star power". In the mid-1980s, Time described Jackson as "the hottest single phenomenon since Elvis Presley". By 1990, Vanity Fair had already cited Jackson as the most popular artist in the history of show business. Daily Telegraph writer Tom Utley called him an "extremely important figure in the history of popular culture" and a "genius". His total lifetime earnings from royalties on his solo recordings and music videos, revenue from concerts and endorsements have been estimated at $500 million; some analysts have speculated that his music catalog holdings could be worth billions of dollars. Cited as one of the world's most famous men, Jackson's highly publicized personal life, coupled with his successful career, has made him a part of popular culture for almost four decades.

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The King of Pop, Michael Jackson is dead. He took to the stage as a child star and went on to set the world dancing to the thumping rhythms of his music for decades, died Thursday, TMZ website reported. He was 50.

"We've just learned Michael Jackson has died," TMZ said.

"Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon and paramedics were unable to revive him. We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back," the entertainment site said.

There was no official confirmation of the reported death and spokespersons for Jackson could not be reached for comment.

Earlier, the Los Angeles Times said that the singer had been rushed to a Los Angeles-area hospital by fire department paramedics who found him not breathing when they arrived at the singer's home.

The newspaper said paramedics performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation at the scene before taking him to the UCLA Medical Center hospital.

Jackson had been due to start a series of comeback concerts in London on July 13 running until March 2010. The singer, whose hits include "Thriller" and "Billie Jean," had been rehearsing in the Los Angeles area for the past two months.

The shows for the 50 London concerts sold out within hours of going on sale in March.

Jackson started out as a child star in the band "The Jackson 5" more than 40 years ago.

He has lived as a virtual recluse since his acquittal in 2005 on charges of child molestation.

There have been concerns about Jackson's health in recent years but the promoters of the London shows, AEG Live, said in March that Jackson had passed a 4-1/2 hour physical examination with independent doctors.