The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

October 15, 2009

William Wayne Justice, Noted Judge, Dies at 89

William Wayne Justice, Noted Judge, Dies at 89
By DOUGLAS MARTIN - NY Times
Published: October 14, 2009

Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court, who ruled on ground-breaking class-action suits that compelled Texas to integrate schools, reform prisons, educate illegal immigrants and revamp many other policies, died Tuesday in Austin. He was 89.

Luz Probus, his judicial assistant, confirmed the death.

Until shortly before his death, Judge Justice had presided over cases in Austin, having taken senior status there in 1998.

Judge Justice was a small-town lawyer active in Democratic Party politics when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the federal bench of the Eastern District of Texas in 1968. Sitting in Tyler, Tex., he made rulings over three decades in a series of major cases that caused him to be called the most powerful man in Texas by those who agreed with his largely liberal decisions and the most hated by those who differed.

In a 1998 column in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Molly Ivins made what she called the “painfully obvious point” that Judge Justice lived up to his name, saying he “brought the United States Constitution to Texas.”

The same year, Lino Graglia, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, “He has wreaked more havoc and misery and injury to the people of Texas than any man in the last 25 years.”

If Judge Justice seemed high-handed, it was partly because he believed that the founding fathers wanted judges to seize and command the higher ground. Perhaps not surprisingly, people reacted with hate mail, death threats, ostracism and bumper stickers demanding his impeachment.

“The plain fact of the matter is that the majority is sometimes wrong,” Judge Justice declared in an interview with The New York Times in 1982.

Frank R. Kemerer, who wrote “William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography” (1991), said in an interview on Wednesday, “He had a transcendent value, which was to advance human dignity and provide a measure of basic fairness.”

In many cases Judge Justice challenged official intransigence by applying the known law of the land, as he did in 1971 when he told school districts in East Texas to obey the law by integrating. Even 17 years after the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to be integrated, it was not unusual for students in all-black schools to have outhouses rather than indoor restrooms.

Other cases lacked precedent. In 1978, Judge Justice struck down a Texas law that let public school districts charge tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. When the ruling was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court in 1982, millions of children had the right to a free education.

“There was absolutely no case law on it,” Judge Justice said in an interview with The Star-Telegram in 1998. “I found no case, no statute that covered the point of law that I had to decide. So I guess I made my own little contribution.”

To many, the judge defined the concept of activist judge. In the early 1970s, he had his law clerks — many of them from top law schools like Harvard and Stanford — sift through hundreds of inmate letters complaining of cruel and unusual punishment in Texas prisons. He pulled out eight and consolidated them into a single action, then appointed a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, William Bennett Turner, to handle the case. He asked the federal Justice Department to join with the inmates as a friend of the court.

The state defended a prison system with two doctors for every 17,000 prisoners, where 2,000 inmates slept on the floor and where inmate trustees, known as building tenders, essentially ran the cell blocks through coercion. It contended that Texas in fact had the best penal system in the nation.

In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, Judge Justice ordered major changes in the state’s prison system. In 1987, he held the state in contempt because the promised progress had been so meager.

In 2002, after Texas had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and improve prisons, Judge Justice released the Texas penal system from federal oversight.

Lawyers interested in assembling class-action suits sought out Judge Justice’s court. In 1973, he made a far-reaching decision to require Texas to repair “truly shocking conditions” in its juvenile detention system. Other important rulings included enforcing laws on integrating public housing and enforcing laws on bilingual education.

William Wayne Justice was born in Athens, Tex., on Feb. 25, 1920. When he was 7, his father, Will, a flamboyant lawyer, him a partner, even changing the nameplate above his office door to “W. D. Justice and Son.”

Judge Justice had a series of illnesses as a child, including chronic whooping cough. He later suggested that the experience might have made him more compassionate toward the unfortunate. He was also moved by the hungry, jobless men he saw hanging from boxcars during the Depression, he said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1987.

He graduated from the University of Texas and its law school, served in the Army for four years in Asia during World War II and then went into private law practice with his father.

His father was a good friend of Ralph Yarborough, who became a United States senator from Texas. Mr. Yarborough persuaded President John F. Kennedy to appoint Judge Justice a United States attorney in 1962, then did the same with President Johnson to help him become a federal judge.

“I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into,” Judge Justice said in an interview with Texas Monthly in 2006.

It is unclear whether his expectations included his wife’s being refused service by beauticians and carpenters refusing to work on his house in Tyler once they realized who owned it.

Judge Justice is survived by his wife, the former Sue Rowan; his daughter, Ellen Justice; and a granddaughter.

After threats arising from the epic school desegregation battle at the beginning of his career, Judge Justice did not ask for armed guards. Instead, he took up tae kwon do, the Korean martial art that resembles karate.

“It was a great way to take out my frustrations,” he told The Times. “You build up a lot of hostilities sitting on the bench all day.”

Posted by lois at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2009

Peg Mullen, 92, Who Fanned Her Anger Over Son’s Death Into Antiwar Drive, Dies

"Mrs. Mullen’s militancy never abated. At 74, she rode a bus for 38 hours to protest the first Persian Gulf war. In 2005, at 88, she said she was furious that she could not join Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost a son in the Iraq war, in Ms. Sheehan’s protest outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas."

Peg Mullen, 92, Who Fanned Her Anger Over Son’s Death Into Antiwar Drive, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN- NY Times
Published: October 5, 2009

Peg Mullen, an Iowa farm wife who made herself a living symbol of loss after her son was killed in Vietnam, as she sharply questioned the military’s explanations and became an outspoken antiwar crusader, died Friday in La Porte City, Iowa. She was 92.

Her family announced the death.

After her son Michael was killed by shrapnel from United States artillery on Feb. 18, 1970, Mrs. Mullen did not disguise her rage. She used his death benefit to buy two half-page advertisements in The Des Moines Register, each with more than 700 crosses, one for each Iowan killed in the war.

C. D. B. Bryan, an author and journalist, wrote about the suffering of Mrs. Mullen and her family in “Friendly Fire,” a book that was serialized in The New Yorker and received wide attention when published in 1976.

In 1979, the book was made into a television movie starring Carol Burnett as Mrs. Mullen. It won an Emmy for best drama special.

Mrs. Mullen from the start refused to believe the Pentagon’s account of Michael’s death, that he was killed in an accident. Mr. Bryan’s investigation eventually laid out considerable evidence that the official story was, indeed, true. Mrs. Mullen remained skeptical.

She wrote her own book in 1995, “Unfriendly Fire: A Mother’s Memoir,” expanding on her doubts. Around 40 of her son’s letters added poignancy to the story.

Mrs. Mullen’s obstinacy, distrust of officialdom and wicked humor characterized her decades of antiwar activity, including those following the Vietnam War. An e-mail message she wrote to a columnist for The Register in 2002 showed her raw emotional power.

“I have no idea of your age,” she wrote the columnist, “but I hope you never have to stand in a quiet corner of an airport and say goodbye to a son in uniform, knowing in your heart that you’ll never see him again.

“I hope you never suffer the horror of a military man sitting at your kitchen table trying to tell how your son died — then wait 10 days for his body to be returned and his casket unloaded in a darkened corner of the same airport.”

Mr. Bryan suggested in his book that the Mullen family’s pain might be seen as a larger lesson of the Vietnam War, ultimately more important than definitively assigning blame for Michael’s death. Writing of the atmosphere in which the Mullens and similarly stricken families lived, Mr. Bryan wrote of “those sounds which were not spoken at all: the slam of a hand hitting the table in rage, the breath caught because an onrushing memory was causing too much pain.”

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Michael’s commander in Vietnam, met with Mrs. Mullen and her husband and tried to answer her questions as clearly as he could. But he could not satisfy them.

“To me, the death of Michael Mullen was not just one tragedy, but two: the needless death of a young man, and the bitterness that was consuming his parents,” the general wrote in his autobiography.

Margaret Goodyear was born in Pocahontas, Iowa, in 1917, and after graduating from high school moved to Des Moines to work in various federal jobs. In 1941, she married Oscar Mullen, known as Gene. They settled on the 120-acre farm near La Porte City that had been in the family for four generations. In addition to farming, Mr. Mullen worked for Rath Packing and John Deere. Mrs. Mullen worked at J. C. Penney and Santa Claus Industries.

Mrs. Mullen’s mother had been county Democratic chairwoman in the 1920s, and she herself was an active Democrat, serving as a delegate at the party’s 1964, 1968 and 1972 national conventions. Her forebodings about Vietnam were solidifying into opposition before the death of Michael, who had been a graduate student in biochemistry when he was drafted in 1968.

In an interview in 2005 with The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., she remembered trying to comfort a friend whose son had died in the war by saying, “He died for our country.”

The friend snapped that Mrs. Mullen should never say that to anyone again. “You can’t justify what’s going on,” the friend said.

After Michael was killed, Mrs. Mullen refused a military funeral and spurned her son’s medals. She returned President Richard M. Nixon’s letter with the note, “Send it to the next damn fool.”

She declined a free grave marker with a military inscription. She bought a tombstone, and used the verb “killed” rather than “died.”

Mr. Mullen died in 1986.

Mrs. Mullen is survived by another son, John; her daughters, Patricia Hulting and Mary DeJana; and six grandchildren.

Mrs. Mullen’s militancy never abated. At 74, she rode a bus for 38 hours to protest the first Persian Gulf war. In 2005, at 88, she said she was furious that she could not join Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost a son in the Iraq war, in Ms. Sheehan’s protest outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas.

Posted by lois at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

Mercedes Sosa, Who Sang of Argentina’s Turmoil & Resistance, Dies at 74

Mercedes Sosa, Who Sang of Argentina’s Turmoil, Dies at 74

By LARRY ROHTER
Published: October 5, 2009

Mercedes Sosa, the Argentine folk singer whose politically charged repertory, sung in a powerful, earthy and impassioned alto voice, led her to be known throughout Latin America as “the voice of the voiceless,” died early Sunday in Buenos Aires. She was 74.

Ms. Sosa had been admitted to a hospital in the Argentine capital two weeks ago, suffering from kidney disease and with liver and lung problems. Her death was announced on her Web site and by her son, Fabián Matus, who said: “Mercedes Sosa has lived her 74 years to the fullest. She did practically everything that she wanted to do.”

In a career that spanned 60 years, Ms. Sosa became revered as both a victim of and a commentator on the political and social turmoil that afflicted her country and the rest of the continent. She was one of the pioneers of the “Nueva Canción” or “New Song” movement, a style of socially conscious music drawing on folk elements that first flowered in the 1960s, and enjoyed her biggest commercial success and political influence interpreting songs from that genre, like Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a La Vida” and Horacio Guarany’s “If the Singer Is Silenced.”

“Mercedes Sosa is synonymous with struggle, resistance and freedom,” the newspaper Clarín, Argentina’s leading daily, stated in an online tribute to the singer that will also be part of a special section to be published on Monday. “Traditional and modern, rural and worldly, rough and sophisticated, she was nothing more and nothing less than the most important Argentine singer in history.”

Haydée Mercedes Sosa was born in Tucumán, in northwestern Argentina, on July 9, 1935, the daughter of a day laborer and a washerwoman, and grew up in poverty. One of her grandfathers was a French immigrant, while the other was a Quechua-speaking Indian, and that mestizo background extended to her music, which drew upon and mixed both the Andean and the European song traditions.

Ms. Sosa’s career began at the age of 15 when, singing a song called “I’m Sad” under a pseudonym, she won an amateur hour competition on a local radio station. It was not until 1962, however that she recorded her first full-length album. Over the next decade, Ms. Sosa, also known as La Negra because of her dark hair and Indian features, became more and more popular throughout South America, thanks both to her resonant, expressive voice and to her reliance on songs that commented on the problems and issues of the day.

But after the military seized power in Argentina in 1976 and installed a murderous dictatorship, Ms. Sosa, who was publicly identified with parties of the left, began having political problems and found many of her songs banned from the radio. She complained of being harassed, followed and threatened by police, military and paramilitary forces, and after she was arrested in 1979 and released following international protests, she went into exile, first in Spain and then in France.

She was able to go back to Argentina in 1982, as the hold of the Armed Forces was weakening. But Ms. Sosa’s musical tastes had broadened during her years in exile, and after her return she became an early advocate of and mother figure for a new generation of singer-songwriters whose roots were more in rock ’n’ roll and international pop than traditional or folk music. She quickly added songs by future stars like Charly García and Fito Páez to her repertory, giving their careers and music both credibility and an important commercial boost. She continued to champion emerging young talent until her death.

Ms. Sosa was married to a musician, Manuel Óscar Matus, for eight years, and later lived with Pocho Mazzitelli, who was also her manager, until his death in 1978. Fabián Matus is her only child.

As her international renown expanded, Ms. Sosa seized on opportunities to collaborate with performers outside of Latin America, like Luciano Pavarotti, Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Nana Mouskouri and Joan Baez. After touring with Ms. Sosa in Europe in the late 1980s, Ms Baez described her as “monumental in stature, a brilliant singer with tremendous charisma who is both a voice and a persona.”

“I have never seen anything like her,” Ms. Baez added. “As far as performers go, she is simply the best.”

This year, Ms. Sosa released a two-CD set called “Cantora,” or “Singer,” that featured her in duets with more than a dozen Latin American and Spanish singer-songwriters, some of them young enough to be her grandchildren. The roster of participants is a who’s who of contemporary Latin American pop, including Shakira, Julieta Venegas, Caetano Veloso, Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquín Sabina, Gustavo Cerati, Jorge Drexler and Calle 13. An accompanying DVD has also been released, but hopes for a tour had to be abandoned because of Ms. Sosa’s declining health.

“Cantora” has been nominated for three 2009 Latin Grammy Awards, including best album and best folk recording. Ms. Sosa, who recorded more than 70 albums and CDs, won the Latin Grammy for best folk recording three times, in 2000, 2003 and 2006, and has from the start been considered a favorite to win again at this year’s ceremony, which is to be held in Las Vegas in November.

In recognition of her status as “the nation’s most beloved voice,” as Clarín put it, on Sunday afternoon Ms. Sosa’s body was lying in state at the Argentine Congress building in Buenos Aires. According to Argentine press reports, her body is to be cremated on Monday in a private ceremony.

Outside the Congress building on Sunday, long lines of fans, ranging from artists who admired and copied her to the ordinary people who flocked to her concerts, waited to pay their last respects. “Thank you Negra, for your singing and your struggle,” read the placard one man held aloft.
More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on October 5, 2009, on page A21 of the New York edition.

Posted by lois at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2009

Dee Hubbard: Fighter Against Corruption and Private Prisons

One for the little people

By Krestia DeGeorge
Anchorage Press
September 2, 2009

According to the story, written by Rich Mauer, Hubbard bears no small responsibility for the start of what would eventually become the federal government’s investigation into government corruption in Alaska.

Mrs. Hubbard once worked in government, and had brushes with it as an engaged citizen—the piece describes a fight that went to the assembly to save a Muldoon neighborhood library. But Hubbard’s moment came late in life, when she and her husband learned of a group that was working on building a private prison in the state.

As Mauer recounts: “She and her husband began following the money, from halfway house contracts that [Bill] Weimar held with the state Corrections Department to political contributions by [Bill] Allen, whose company, Veco, would have built the prison.”

Weimar and Allen, of course, eventually pleaded guilty to corruption, once a small federal probe into the private prison issue turned into a large federal probe into corruption surrounding oil tax legislation. That investigation, as everyone knows, eventually snared a handful of powerful Alaskans, ranging from Vic Kohring to Ted Stevens.

In the process, it changed the face of Alaska politics.

Without the corruption probe, Democrats might not have won enough seats to wield any power in the legislature, leading to one-party rule. Without the probe, Sarah Palin might not have found a strong enough anti-corruption backlash into which she could successfully tap during her Republican primary challenge to Frank Murkowski three years ago. Without the probe Ted Stevens might still be stalking the halls of the Senate in his Hulk tie, and national Democrats, without a filibuster-proof majority in the upper house, might be talking about something less controversial than the nation’s broken health care system.

Without Dee Hubbard, there might not have been a corruption probe.

Okay, maybe that last one is a stretch. Something as big as the corruption investigation we’ve seen here in the last several years is generally too large to rest on the shoulders of just one individual. And if Hubbard hadn’t pursued her curiosity and sense of civic outrage, somebody else—eventually, inevitably—would have.

But as Senator Mark Begich told Mauer, Hubbard wasn’t the type to wait for somebody else: “When she thought something was unjust, she was not going to sit around and wait for someone to do something—she felt she was the someone.”

This is an old story in politics. A woman I once interviewed for a political profile got started because she was upset by a poorly planned development in her neighborhood. She didn’t stop the development, but she didn’t stop being involved either. Fast-forward a few decades and the same woman was about to take the reins of one of the most powerful committees in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But with Hubbard this story comes with a twist. She may’ve followed her civic instincts, but she didn’t follow them into a public office, or even into the limelight. She was content to work hard in the public’s interest, but to stay out of the public’s eye. Contrast that kind of humility with the brazen self-promotion of some who filed fistfuls of ethics complaints against then-Governor Sarah Palin, then rushed to congratulate themselves for having done so on blogs and in other sympathetic outlets.

Such pervasive selflessness—giving one’s time and effort for the greater good while spurning all compensation, whether in the form of pay or notoriety, except the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing—seems valuable and rare.

Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a season of uncommon ambition in Alaska, especially when it comes to politics.

Perhaps that’s because of the power vacuum created by the power structures the federal corruption investigation dismantled. Perhaps it’s that we’ve become accustomed to the national media spotlight that’s been trained on Alaska in the past 12 months, following Sarah Palin’s rise and fall from political prominence. Perhaps it’s always there bubbling under the surface, emerging when conditions are right.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition, of course, and many of our most ambitious would-be leaders have impressive resumes and thoughtful policies. We’ll be spending a lot of time soon covering a gubernatorial race and a race for the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives. And that’s as it should be.

But this is a good moment to take a break from that, to honor Hubbard—and those like her who discharge their civic duties beyond glow of the spotlights cast on the public stage.

Hubbard died on Saturday of kidney and liver failure at the age of 62.

She’ll probably go down as little more than a proverbial footnote in Alaska history. But the events she helped set in motion—that cataclysmic shift in who holds power in Alaska and how—and their aftermath, will likely prove to be a central part of this young state’s history for decades to come.

Let’s hope that the next Dee Hubbard is already out there, anonymously tracking the footprints left by those in power.
http://www.anchoragepress.com/articles/2009/09/02/news/doc4a9effdbb708d338753963.txt

Posted by lois at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2009

Dee Hubbard: Organizer, Researcher, Activist Against Private Prison Movement

From Frank Smith, Organizer, Private Corrections Institute on Dee Hubbard:

It hasn't ever been publicized, but Dee and I were largely responsible for initiating and "following the money" that resulted in the successful prosecution of a dozen Alaska legislators, lobbyists and executives. She and I uncovered a great deal of incriminating evidence of corruption starting back when we began working together against Alaska for-profit proposals in 2000. I had recruited her to the issue, but it wasn't much of a chore as she was already incredibly knowledgeable about state politics and immediately devoted her boundless energy to the task.

We even were responsible, though it also never has been publicized, for stopping the "Bridge To Nowhere." Gravina Island had been proposed as the site of a Cornell prison in 2001, with the feds expected to pick up the quarter billion dollar cost of the bridge and an electrical intertie. We stopped it with a grand total of five supporters in Ketchikan and the state capitol.

While most of the work that I did on it was over by 2004, and the investigation didn't become public until three years ago this week, Dee literally spent three years tracking the labyrinthine for-profit money trail full-time as a volunteer until the first public search warrants were executed.

That work, ironically, produced the Democrats "60th vote" in the U.S. Senate, as a then-convicted Ted Stevens lost his seat a few weeks after the conclusion of his D.C. corruption trial last October. Mark Begich, an old Hubbard family friend, won by 3,953 votes.

She and I were able to help dozens of communities within and without Alaska to successfully resist the siting of private prisons. Local activists in half a dozen other states, including Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota and especially, Colorado, have cherished memories of her and the assistance she gave them.

Dee was a master at "virtual" organizing and could count upcoming legislative committee votes better than anyone I've ever met.

She and I spent hours, most weeks, on the phone, collaborating on strategy and research, and exchanged literally tens of thousands of e-mails over the past nine years.

Long before she came to join us in the prison struggles, she was well known statewide as an immensely effective education activist. She served on many boards and commissions and was our Private Corrections Institute President from its inception until her death.

Her work is a testament and legacy to her effectiveness and spirit.

She will be greatly missed.

Frank Smith
Field Organizer
Private Corrections Institute

From the Anchorage Daily News
Low-key anti-corruption campaigner is dead at 62
By RICHARD MAUER
September 1st, 2009 11:08 AM

Dee Hubbard, a behind-the-scenes campaigner who took on private prison interests in Alaska and then expanded that fight as an anti-corruption, volunteer citizen ally of the FBI, died Saturday in Anchorage. She was 62.

While Hubbard is hardly a household name, she was well known to the legislators, FBI agents and reporters who were trying to unravel the complicated syndicate that moved from one Alaska community to another, seeking a willing locale and beneficial financing to build a private prison.

Two members of that group, Bill Allen and Bill Weimar, would eventually plead guilty to corruption charges. Though the federal corruption investigation in Alaska is famous as a probe of bribery associated with oil taxes, it started life in 2003 or 2004 as "Operation Polar Pen" -- a private prison investigation.

"Dee Hubbard played a very low-key role in educating the federal folks into what was going on behind the scenes in the state of Alaska, good and bad," said State Sen. Johnny Ellis, D-Anchorage. "She played a part in helping to clean up the state."

Her husband, Charlie Hubbard, said she died early Saturday morning.

Dee Hubbard was diagnosed with liver and kidney failure in March and spent much of the summer going to dialysis sessions as her health declined precipitously.

Hubbard, an only child, grew up in Spokane. Her dad, George Derr, was a first lieutenant in the elite Alamo Scouts, an Army special forces unit that operated behind Japanese lines during the World War II campaign in the Pacific. In his civilian life, Derr chose teaching over a professional football career, but he taught the game -- and toughness -- to his daughter. As a young high school teacher in Spokane, Hubbard was also the football coach, her husband said.

Hubbard had a master's degree in political science and got involved in insider politics in Olympia, going to work for the Washington legislature there. Someone suggested she do the same in Juneau, and she moved to Alaska in 1977 and was hired by the state Senate. From there, she got a job administering grants at the now-defunct state Department of Community and Regional Affairs.

Charlie Hubbard, an Alaska Native, got a job as administrator for the village of Cantwell. When he started, a $40,000 state grant had been pending for five years and it was his job to figure out why it was never paid. As a new employee at C&RA, Dee Derr was handed the problem grants, including Cantwell's.

"That's how I met Dee," Charlie said.

When he realized the relationship was probably going to be more than just a grantor-grantee one, Charlie said he asked to be removed as local administrator of the grant to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. He said Dee's boss was surprised by the extraordinary request.

They two were married in 1979 and have two sons, Frank and David.

U.S. Sen. Mark Begich said he got to know Dee and Charlie in 1988 when he served on the Anchorage Assembly and they were living in the Muldoon area and trying to save the neighborhood library.

"It didn't matter if it was setting up a card table to get signatures to save it, or just being a voice out there for northeast Anchorage," Begich said in a telephone interview. "She was a pretty strong-willed person. When she thought something was unjust, she was not going to sit around and wait for someone to do something -- she felt she was the someone."

In 2002, when Charlie retired as a pump station worker on the trans-Alaska pipeline, the couple moved to Sterling. It was there that Dee Hubbard first heard about plans to build a private prison -- from her husband, Charlie.

"There goes our state again," Charlie remembers telling her.

"What are you talking about?" she said.

"They're going to build a private prison, guarantee this prison that it'll have a contract for years, and after so many years, they're going to give the prison to them. I need to go Juneau," Charlie said.

"Why do you need to go to Juneau?"

"Because I want to build a store, and I want the state to guarantee me a contract that they'll buy from me for so many years, I'll run the store, and then the state can just give me the store."

"Let me look into this," Dee said.

She and her husband began following the money, from halfway house contracts that Weimar held with the state Corrections Department to political contributions by Allen, whose company, Veco, would have built the prison.

That's also when Dee met Frank Smith, who once ran prison counseling programs under contract with the state but who by then was fighting the private prison effort. He had already helped stop the consortium in South Anchorage and Delta Junction, and with Dee, they followed the developers around, from Kenai to Whittier and elsewhere.

"The two of us worked closely together on prison after prison after prison," he said. "It was like we were in the same office together, even though we were miles away and we weren't working for an organization."

"We stopped them everywhere," he said.

Starting in 2003, Hubbard began working with the FBI agent who was leading the early stages of the investigation into corruption in the Alaska Legislature, Mary Beth Kepner.

"They would talk on the phone, Mary Beth and Dee," Charlie said. "Dee started sharing this information -- what politicians are connected to who." She took an oath administered by the FBI that she wouldn't improperly disclose investigative details, which was fine with her, Charlie said.

"She was never a witness and didn't want to be," he said. "Alaska's too small." She was afraid her sons would be blackballed in the early stages of their careers, he said.

Kepner declined to comment.

Begich had an idea she played an important role in the corruption investigation, but she always held her cards close.

"She never told the full story, but she would tell you enough to make you aware that she was working on something that sooner or later you'd read in the paper," he said.

A visitation for Dee Hubbard is scheduled Thursday at 3 p.m. and a memorial service at 4 p.m. at Witzleben Funeral Home, 1707 Bragaw St. Burial will be Saturday in Cantwell.
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/918555.html

Posted by lois at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2009

Marilyn Clement: June 30, 1935 to August 3, 2009

Marilyn Clement: June 30, 1935 to August 3, 2009
From Healthcare-NOW!

"...working for the common good is a wonderful way to live a wonderful way to spend a lifetime." - Marilyn Clement, June 7, 2003
Marilyn Clement

Marilyn Clement, founder and National Coordinator of Healthcare-NOW!, passed away on Monday, August 3 surrounded by her children, Scott and Pam, her daughter-in-law Liz, and the caring thoughts of all of us who knew her, worked with her, and had come to love her.

Marilyn's life and work was dedicated to social justice. She worked tirelessly to build, speak, and spread the word about meaningful civil rights and healthcare reform. Her leadership, vision, and passion helped to strengthen the recognition of healthcare as a human right throughout the nation.

Marilyn led a rich, decades-long career in social justice activism, including civil rights, women's rights, human rights, and peace. She worked with and through a variety of organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the United Methodist Church, and the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, among other organizations.

Marilyn served as the National Coordinator for Healthcare-NOW until her death. Doctors diagnosed her with multiple myeloma in June of 2008, and Marilyn had to step back from her leadership role at Healthcare-NOW to undergo extensive and painful treatments. A tribute to her organizing skills, a group of nine committed activists responded to her call, and stepped up to form a Steering Committee to assume leadership during her illness.

At the June 7, 2009 event at Judson Memorial Church, Marilyn's consistent optimism rang loud and clear as she remarked to the crowd, "We are on the verge of winning something that is so desperately needed for all of our people... Love to all of you. Keep up the fight... And we are going to win single-payer healthcare."

Healthcare-NOW! recognizes the great loss to everyone in the single-payer healthcare and human rights communities that Marilyn's passing represents. Our resolve to continue and strengthen the movement she started is stronger than ever. As we mourn her loss, we also celebrate the amazing gifts she has given to us all.

Marilyn is survived by her brother, Les Boydstun; her children Pam and Scott; her daughter-in-law Liz Arwine, widow of her deceased son Mark; and three grandchildren Kendall, Chelsea and Alex. Following Marilyns wishes, the family is planning a memorial service to be held at Judson Church on Washington Square later this fall.

The family suggests that those who wish to donate in Marilyn's memory should do so to the Center for Constitutional Rights or to Healthcare-NOW!

Posted by lois at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2009

Luke Cole: Early Leader of Environmental Justice Movement

Luke Cole, Court Advocate for Minorities, Dies at 46
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: June 10, 2009

Luke Cole, an early leader of the environmental justice movement, which holds that many minority neighborhoods have become toxic dumping grounds because their residents are poor and powerless, died Saturday in Uganda. He was 46 and lived in San Francisco.

Mr. Cole was killed in a head-on traffic accident when a truck veered across the road, his father, Herbert Cole, said. His wife, Nancy Shelby, was seriously injured. The couple was on vacation.

As executive director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, an organization based in San Francisco that he founded in 1989 with Ralph Abascal, Mr. Cole played a key role in several significant environmental law cases.

In the mid-1990s, he represented residents of Kettleman City, Calif., most of them Hispanic, in their campaign to stop Chemical Waste Management Inc. from building a toxic-waste incinerator there. Kettleman City, in the San Joaquin Valley, was already the site of a vast toxic-waste landfill. A state court enjoined the company from constructing the incinerator.

Even more, the court invalidated the environmental-impact report issued by Kings County, Calif., citing its failure to translate even the summary of the study into Spanish.

“It really raised the issue of systemic exclusion of communities from understanding environmental decisions that affect their lives,” Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, said in an interview.

“Luke actually began this work before the term ‘environmental justice’ was in widespread use,” Mr. Angel said.

More recently, Mr. Cole represented a group of residents of the Waterfront South neighborhood in Camden, N.J. — most of them black or Hispanic — who took the unusual action of citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

The plaintiffs claimed that the department had violated their rights by issuing a permit to build a concrete grinding plant without considering that it had already granted more than twice as many industrial permits for Waterfront South as were found in the typical New Jersey ZIP code.

They also argued that more than 20 percent of Camden’s contaminated sites — abandoned factories, a chemical plant, waste-treatment plants, automotive shops and a petroleum coke transfer station — were in their neighborhood. In 2001, the United States District Court in Camden ruled in favor of the plaintiffs.

“It marked the first recognition by any court that African-Americans and Latinos were experiencing discrimination with regard to the siting of noxious, polluting facilities,” said Olga Pomar, a lawyer with South Jersey Legal Services and a co-counsel in the case. “That sparked greater awareness among environmental justice activists.”

Later that year, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit declared in a related case that private citizens did not have a legal right to enforce the antidiscrimination regulations that were the basis of their claim. Only the federal Environmental Protection Agency had that right, the appeals court said. In effect, the ruling overturned the decision in the Camden case.

From 1996 through 2000, Mr. Cole served on the E.P.A.’s national environmental justice advisory council.

Luke Winthrop Cole was born in North Adams, Mass., on July 15, 1962, one of three children of Herbert Cole, a professor of art history, and Alexandra Chappell Cole, an architectural preservationist. Besides his parents and his wife, Mr. Cole is survived by a son, Zane; his stepmother, Shelley Reed Cole; two brothers, Peter and Thomas; his sister, Sarah Cole; and a stepbrother, Daryn Kenny.

Mr. Cole graduated from Stanford in 1984 and then worked for three years in Washington as one of Ralph Nader’s so-called Nader’s Raiders, editing a consumer advice newsletter. After receiving his law degree from Harvard in 1989, he moved to San Francisco and soon after started the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

The environmental rights of American Indians were of particular interest to Mr. Cole. In one California case, he represented the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, which is trying to halt open-pit gold mining using cyanide to leach out the gold on ancestral land in Death Valley. A ruling in pending.

In another case, he helped residents of Kivalina, an Inuit village in northwest Alaska, sue the Teck Corporation, claiming that the company’s zinc and lead mine had polluted the village water supply for years.

A settlement, reached last year, called for Teck to stop depositing mining tailings into the Kivalina River and to build a pipeline to the ocean, about 50 miles away.

But legal action is not the ultimate solution to environmental discrimination, Mr. Cole told The New York Times in 1993.

“The only way to ever decisively and permanently win these battles is through the political process,” he said. “When a community organizes itself at the grass roots, we can exercise our power, the power of people.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 11, 2009, on page A29 of the New York edition.

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Alan Berkman, 63, Activist Doctor, Dies

Alan Berkman, 63, Activist Doctor, Dies
By DENNIS HEVESI- Tne New York Times
Published: June 14, 2009

Physician, fugitive, federal prisoner, clinician to the homeless, advocate for AIDS patients. epidemiologist: That was the arc of Alan Berkman’s career.

Dr. Berkman in 1985, accused of armed robbery and possessing explosives.

Dr. Berkman, a Vietnam-era radical who spent eight years in prison for armed robbery and possession of explosives and who later founded Health GAP — a leader in the coalition that helped make AIDS medication available to millions in the world’s poorest countries — died in Manhattan on June 5. He was 63 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was cancer, with which he had struggled for nearly 20 years, said his wife, Dr. Barbara Zeller.

Eagle Scout; high school salutatorian; National Merit Scholar; honor student at Cornell, class of 1967; graduate of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, class of ’71; medical director of the Highbridge Woodycrest Center in the Bronx, one of the first residences designed for AIDS patients; vice chairman of the epidemiology department at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health since 2007: Those, too, are parts of Dr. Berkman’s record, along with his years working in clinics in the South Bronx, Lower Manhattan and rural Alabama.

His life was laced with an activism that went to extremes, both in the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s and into the Reagan years.

On May 23, 1985, Dr. Berkman and a friend were arrested outside Doylestown, Pa. In their car, federal agents found a pistol, a shotgun and keys to a garage that contained 100 pounds of dynamite. That day ended Dr. Berkman’s two decades of participation in radical groups, among them the Students for a Democratic Society.

Four years earlier, on Oct. 20, 1981, an offshoot of the Weather Underground had attempted to rob a Brink’s armored truck in Nyack, N.Y. In the shootout, two police officers and a guard died.

A year later, a federal grand jury investigating the case subpoenaed Dr. Berkman, who, a witness said, had treated one of the robbery defendants for a gunshot wound. When he was indicted and charged with being an accessory after the fact, Dr. Berkman jumped bail; he spent several years on the run.

While a fugitive, he entered a suburban Connecticut supermarket with a friend; they brandished revolvers, tied up the manager and stole $21,480. Prosecutors later said the money was used to buy the explosives found in Doylestown and to support other radical groups. Dr. Berkman was sentenced to 10 years in prison; he served 8.

In 1994, when a reporter for The New York Times interviewed Dr. Berkman at El Rio, a clinic in the South Bronx where he was treating drug-addicted parolees, the doctor, too, was on parole.

“There is plenty to learn from all the mistakes we made,” he said at the time, referring to his radical colleagues. “Power is corrupting. And the use of violence is a form of power. People motivated to stop the suffering of others have to be careful not be caught up in the same dynamics.”

He changed his dynamics, not his motivation. In 1995, he became a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia, working with mentally ill homeless men who had AIDS.

In 1998 and ’99, Dr. Berkman did research in South Africa, where AIDS was rampant. Upon returning to New York, he gathered a group of fellow AIDS activists and founded Health Global Access Project, known as Health GAP, which became one of the leading groups in the campaign to provide antiretroviral drugs to poor people around the world.

“He was one of the key figures in changing 20 years of U.S. trade policy on patents and medicine,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, one of the organizations that shared Dr. Berkman’s mission.

Health GAP, along with other advocacy groups, successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to change its opposition to compulsory licenses — orders by foreign governments requiring the owner of a drug patent to issue a license to a generic manufacturer, making the drug cheaper. Until that policy change, trade tariffs were often used against countries that issued compulsory licenses.

At the time, antiretroviral drugs cost about $15,000 a year for a patient. Now, with some American manufacturers sharply reducing their prices, and with generic marketers, particularly in India, offering them at very low prices, the drugs can cost as little as $150 a year.

In 1999, fewer than one million people, all in Western countries, had access to the H.I.V. medications they needed, said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health GAP. “Now,” she said, “there are close to four million, and more than half of them are in the poorest countries.”

Born in Brooklyn on Sept. 4, 1945, Alan Berkman was one of four sons of Samuel and Mona Osit Berkman. The family later moved to Middletown, N.Y., where his father owned a plumbing supply company. Besides Dr. Zeller, whom he married in 1975, Dr. Berkman is survived by his brothers, Jerry, Larry and Steven; his daughters, Sarah Zeller-Berkman and Harriet Clark; and a grandson.

Dr. Berkman learned he had a cancer of the lymph nodes while in prison and had recurring bouts with the disease.

In 1994, while treating parolees in the South Bronx, Dr. Berkman was asked how someone so committed to saving lives could have joined groups that were willing to plant bombs.

“I had seen pain in the communities I worked in,” he said, and “an increasing indifference” to that pain. “We became desperate and kept going further out on the limb.”

He added, “Between going to prison and having cancer two times and knowing that death sits on my shoulder, I try to make every day matter.”
Sign in to Recommend More Articles in New York Region » A version of this article appeared in print on June 15, 2009, on page A19 of the New York edition.

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June 02, 2009

Jerry Rosenberg, Jailhouse Lawyer, Dies at 72

Jerry Rosenberg, Jailhouse Lawyer, Dies at 72

By SEWELL CHAN
Published: June 1, 2009

Jerry Rosenberg, who was spared the death penalty for the 1962 murders of two New York City police detectives, and who became a pioneering jailhouse lawyer and a legal adviser for the leaders of the Attica prison uprising in 1971, died on Monday at the Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, N.Y. He was 72, and the state’s longest-serving inmate at his death.

Mr. Rosenberg, who was admitted to the prison’s medical unit in 2000, died of natural causes, according to a spokesman for the State Department of Correctional Services, who said he could not provide further details because of privacy rules.

“Of all the jailhouse lawyers, he was the greatest and the best known,” said Ronald L. Kuby, the defense lawyer, whose former law partner, William M. Kunstler, worked closely with Mr. Rosenberg during the Attica uprising. “He came of age in prison before there was widespread access to counsel for post-conviction proceedings.”

Mr. Rosenberg had already served nearly four years in prison for a robbery conviction in Queens when he was arrested and charged with killing two off-duty police detectives, Luke J. Fallon and John P. Finnegan, in a botched robbery of the Boro Park Tobacco Company in Brooklyn on May 18, 1962. It was the first double homicide of New York City police officers in 35 years, and about 1,000 officers were assigned to the manhunt. Mr. Rosenberg turned himself in, on his 25th birthday, at the offices of The Daily News, then on East 42nd Street.

Mr. Rosenberg and an accomplice, Anthony Portelli, were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. In 1965, the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, upheld the convictions but condemned the Police Department for severely beating a witness who testified at the trial. Later that year, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller commuted the death sentences, saying that they could not have been imposed under a new law that virtually abolished capital punishment in the state.

Mr. Rosenberg began his prison sentence on Feb. 19, 1963. Another man, James Moore, who began serving a sentence for murder on July 12 of that year, is now the state’s longest-serving inmate, officials said.

Mr. Rosenberg, who always maintained he was not guilty of the killings, studied law through correspondence courses; he received a bachelor’s degree in 1967 from the Blackstone School of Law in Chicago.

Nicknamed Jerry the Jew — “he developed that moniker at a time when it was not politically incorrect,” Mr. Kuby said — Mr. Rosenberg soon became a well-known advocate for fellow inmates. (There is no record that he was ever admitted to the bar.)

During the Attica uprising in September 1971, which resulted in 43 deaths, Mr. Rosenberg was the chief legal adviser for the uprising’s leaders. After the State Police retook the prison, Mr. Rosenberg was transferred to Sing Sing, in Ossining.

Over the years, in various prisons, Mr. Rosenberg worked as a porter and as a substance abuse counselor. From 1996 to 1999, he was a paralegal assistant in the law library at Wende, where he had been held since 1991.

Jerome Rosenberg was born on May 23, 1937. Prison officials said that Mr. Rosenberg had at least two brothers, a wife and a son, but that they were not permitted to identify them and did not know whether any of them was still living. At the time of his arrest in 1962, Mr. Rosenberg was reported to have had a young daughter by a former wife.

Mr. Rosenberg was the subject of a biography by Stephen Bello, “Doing Life: The Extraordinary Saga of America’s Greatest Jailhouse Lawyer,” published by St. Martin’s Press in 1982 and later made into a television movie, starring Tony Danza, in 1986.

In the biography, Mr. Rosenberg is quoted saying that anyone who was to become a lawyer ought to “do some time in jail.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 2, 2009, on page B19

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May 31, 2009

The Rev. Gérard Jean-Juste, Champion of Haitian Rights in U.S., Dies at 62

The Rev. Gérard Jean-Juste, Champion of Haitian Rights in U.S., Dies at 62

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: May 28, 2009- NY Times

The Rev. Gérard Jean-Juste, a Roman Catholic priest who championed the rights of Haitians in the United States and was twice imprisoned in Haiti for his staunch support of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and criticism of the interim government installed in 2004, died Wednesday in Miami. He was 62.

The cause was complications of a stroke and a lung problem, his brother Kernst told The Associated Press.

Father Gerry, as he was often called, came to prominence in the late 1970s as director of the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami, where he became a vocal advocate of Haitians seeking asylum in the United States. Through demonstrations and legal action, he fought tirelessly to force the United States government to change its policy of regarding Haitians as economic rather than political refugees, in sharp contrast to its policy toward Cubans.

After decades spent in exile from the governments of François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, he returned to Haiti in 1991 when Mr. Aristide was elected president, taking the post of minister representing Haitians abroad. His fearless criticism of the government installed to replace Mr. Aristide, and his work for the poor at the Church of Ste. Claire, in Delmas, a suburb of the capital, Port-au-Prince, made him one of Haiti’s most popular political figures.

Father Jean-Juste (pronounced zhahn-ZHOOST) was born in Cavaillon, Haiti, and studied for the priesthood in Canada. In 1971 he became the first Haitian ordained in the United States in a ceremony at the Church of St. Avila in Brooklyn, where he was a deacon. He then returned to Haiti and worked in a remote parish. An adherent of liberation theology, he regarded political activity and service to the poor as his priestly mission.

He left for the United States in 1971 after refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to the government of Jean-Claude Duvalier. While living and working at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering technology from Northeastern University in 1974 and a second bachelor’s in civil engineering from Northeastern in 1977.

In the 1970s, facing political turmoil and grinding poverty, thousands of desperate Haitians sought asylum and economic opportunity in the United States, where they were put into detention centers and, in all but a small number of cases, sent back to Haiti. Father Jean-Juste helped found the Haitian Refugee Center to help refugees, protest government immigration laws and fight local discrimination. He was often seen, bullhorn in hand, at the head of street demonstrations.

“Haitian people had no rights in Haiti, and they have no rights here,” he told The Miami Herald in 1980. “They are starving, they are being separated from their families, they cannot work.”

Marleine Bastien, executive director of the nonprofit organization Haitian Women of Miami, told The Associated Press: “We were out in the streets, demonstrating nearly every day on behalf of other Haitian immigrants. I can still in my mind’s eye see him lying on the ground when buses were taking refugees without process — lying there in the path of the buses.”

Father Jean-Juste also incurred the wrath of the archdiocese of Miami by conducting funeral services for non-Catholic Haitians who drowned at sea and by picketing Archbishop Edward McCarthy of Miami, who he said was a racist failing to defend the rights of Haitian refugees.

“When he first came to the Haitian Refugee Center, most of the church agencies wanted to treat the Haitian refugee issue as one of charity,” Jack Lieberman, a founder of the refugee center, told New Times, a Miami newspaper, in 2005. “Jean-Juste pointed out that there was an injustice.”

In 1980 the center won an important victory when a district court, ruling that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had committed “wholesale violations of due process” and shown racial bias in ordering mass deportations of refugees, ordered that new hearings be held for the more than 4,000 Haitian refugees represented in the class-action suit brought by the center and other organizations.

Father Jean-Juste’s return to Haiti in 1991 plunged him into the country’s turbulent politics. When Mr. Aristide was ousted by a military coup after seven months in office, Father Jean-Juste went into hiding for three years, resurfacing when Mr. Aristide returned to the presidency in 1994. He resumed his work as a rector at the Church of Ste. Claire, in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, where he operated a soup kitchen to feed the poor.

After Mr. Aristide was deposed a second time, in 2004, by a rebellion, Father Jean-Juste became a target of the interim government, which arrested and imprisoned him twice. After his second arrest, in July 2005, he faced charges of involvement in the death of Jacques Roche, a journalist.

By then, he was being put forward as a candidate himself, and the murder charges, universally regarded as politically motivated, caused an international outcry from human rights organizations. After several months, the main charges were dropped, but he was indicted on lesser charges of weapons possession and criminal conspiracy. While he was imprisoned, his supporters tried to register him as a candidate for the 2006 presidential elections, a move that was blocked by the government.

In December 2005 Father Saint-Juste discovered that he had leukemia, and in early 2006 he was released from prison to seek treatment in a Miami hospital. In November 2007 he appeared before an appeals court in Haiti to answer remaining charges against him. Questioned about weapons, he told the judge, “My rosary is my only weapon.” Eventually all charges against him were dropped.
Sign in to Recommend More Articles in World » A version of this article appeared in print on May 29, 2009, on page A23 of the New York edition.

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April 18, 2009

Bryne Grants and another conscequence featured in new film: "American Violet"

Taking Drug Task Forces to Task
By: Lewis Beale
April 17, 2009

In November 2000, a drug task force arrested 28 residents of Hearne, Texas, almost all of them African-American, and charged them with distributing crack cocaine. Pressed to plead guilty to the charges by their public defenders, several of the accused did, but Regina Kelly, a single mother of four, refused. The American Civil Liberty Union's Drug Law Reform Project eventually took up the case and filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 15 of the arrestees, accusing the local district attorney and the

South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force with conducting racially motivated drug sweeps for more than 15 years.
That case, which wound up with the charges against all the ACLU's clients being dropped due to insufficient evidence and the tainted testimony of an unreliable police informant, is now the basis of a movie, "American Violet", opening nationwide on April 17th. Starring newcomer Nicole Beharie as Kelly, as well as Alfre Woodard, Tim Blake Nelson and Charles S. Dutton, the film is practically a primer on drug-task-force abuses under what is known as the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Program.

Enacted in 1988, and recently refunded under President Obama's stimulus package, the Byrne grant program is designed to help states and local jurisdictions fight drugs and the violent crime associated with drug trafficking. The program provides federal money in 29 specific "purpose areas," including crime-victim assistance and alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders, but most of the grants are intended for police activity. And a good deal of the money disbursed is predicated on the number, not the quality, of drug arrests.

"Throughout America, Byrne grants are consistently used to target very low-level drug dealers for arrest and long-term incarceration," said Graham Boyd, lawyer for the Hearne plaintiffs and director of the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project. "You have a drug task force whose goal is to arrest as many people as they can, their funding stream is based on that, so they rely on confidential informants, and their racial profiling is staggering."

"The block grant is based on population and crime rate," added Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance Network. "Because it's based on arrests, the incentive is to focus on arrests, and the more the better. They have an incentive to go after low-level drug dealers, and it leads to civil rights offenses because they have quotas to fill, and that might entail cutting corners."

Hearne was not the first case, nor the most notorious, involving drug-task-force abuses. That honor belongs to Tulia, another small Texas town where, on July 23, 1999, and based on the word of a single informant, 46 people, 39 of them African-American, were accused of selling drugs. As recounted in Tulia, Texas, a documentary recently shown as part of PBS' Independent Lens series [available on DVD at www.newsreel.org], the informant, Tom Coleman — at one point named "Texas Lawman of the Year" - had a checkered law enforcement career, did not wear a recording device during any of his alleged drug buys, made numerous evidentiary errors and was accused of being a racist.

In 2003, a Texas court voided 38 of the Tulia arrests (several of the cases had already been dismissed), and in 2005, Coleman was convicted of perjury when a jury found he had lied about his own arrest for theft during a hearing on the drug cases.
As egregious as these cases were, Boyd says incidents like this are "still happening all over America." And they serve to point out several gaping holes in the well-intentioned, but flawed, Byrne grant program:

• The use of confidential informants, many of them criminals themselves, whose uncorroborated testimony is used to obtain drug convictions. The Hearne informant, for example, had a history of drug addiction and mental illness. "The way informants get used reflects a reality that there are few checks and balances on how law enforcement uses them," said Boyd. "It's easier for them to do this than send in an undercover officer."

• The lack of jurisdictional control. "There's a problem that goes with regional drug task forces," said Piper. "Because they are made up of people from different areas, there is a lack of oversight. There is no one entity you can blame, because they're multi-jurisdictional." Case in point: In both Hearn and Tulia, the cases were solved on the county, not town, level.

• The task forces are self-sustaining. "They use asset forfeiture, which only exists for drug crimes," said Piper, "so police tend to focus on that. Because they can keep what they seize [cash, cars, weapons, etc.] and they get the federal money, they are independent from state and local concerns, and they don't have to go to the city council and justify what they're doing."

• The impact on the black community. African-Americans, who make up about 13 percent of the total population, now account for more than 50 percent of all drug arrests. Piper refers to mass drug arrests in Hearne, Tulia and other places as being akin to "Vietnam War-like body count statistics," which are "used to measure success."

At least Texas got the message. The Lone Star State became the first in the country to require corroboration of informant information to make a drug arrest. Texas also stopped taking Byrne money for drug cases and made them the responsibility of the state police, the Texas Rangers.

And the state changed its drug-war measurement criteria. Officers used to be graded on how many arrests they made; now it's how many drug trafficking organizations they have identified, infiltrated and dismantled. "You actually lose points the more end users — drug offenders, people selling to feed their habits — you arrest," said Piper. "What they're trying to do is get people to stay undercover, work their way up, so they can take down a big trafficker, and that's revolutionary." Because of this, says Piper, drug arrests in Texas dropped by 40 percent last year, but drug seizures doubled.

Still, there are more than 600 drug task forces in the country, and at least a dozen Hearne-like scandals reported in the last 10 years. That might not seem like a lot, but it's more than enough for the people sent to jail on tainted evidence, perjured testimony or pressured into plea bargains in order to avoid jury trials and potential sentences of 30 years or more.
Even worse, says Boyd, is that in small, under-financed communities, the desperation for Byrne grant money is so great, "there's evidence of police being taken off Main Street and being put into these drug task forces."

The bottom line is what this all says about how the war on drugs is being waged, and according to Boyd, Hearne and Tulia "are Exhibit A on why the war is a failure. It's ineffective, expensive and generates a level of racial targeting that has no place in America today."

At least, added Piper, there's a little ray of hope emerging from the Obama administration. Naming Seattle police Chief Gil Kerlikowske — known for progressive and community-based approach to drug issues — to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy could mean that law enforcement will not be the drug czar's only emphasis.

"Both Obama and Kerlikowske have talked about dealing with this as a treatment issue, dealing with the demand side," says Piper. "Short of repealing drug prohibition, it's the most effective way of hurting the drug cartels — you're reducing their profits."
http://www.miller-mccune.com/legal_affairs/taking-drug-task-forces-to-task-1074

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February 14, 2009

Alison Des Forges, 66, Human Rights Advocate, Dies

Alison Des Forges, 66, Human Rights Advocate, Dies

By SEWELL CHAN and DENNIS HEVESI
Published: February 13, 2009
NY Times

Alison L. Des Forges, a human rights activist and historian who tried to call the world’s attention to the looming genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and who later wrote what is considered the definitive account of the eventual slaughter of more than 500,000 Rwandans, was among the passengers killed Thursday when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo. She was 66 and lived in Buffalo.

Her death was confirmed by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group; Dr. Des Forges was senior adviser for its Africa division for nearly 20 years.

Although she lived in Buffalo, Dr. Des Forges (pronounced deh-FORZH) spent much of her adult life in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region of Africa. She was among a group of activists who investigated killings, kidnappings and other rights abuses of civilians in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993.

In May 1994, several weeks into the mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority, Dr. Des Forges called for the killings to be officially declared a genocide. By then about 200,000 people had been killed.

“Governments hesitate to call the horror by its name,” Dr. Des Forges wrote in The New York Times, “for to do so would oblige them to act: signatories to the Convention for the Prevention of Genocide, including the United States, are legally bound to ‘prevent and punish’ it.”

Peacekeepers should be sent into the country and economic sanctions imposed, Dr. Des Forges said, concluding, “Can we do anything less in the face of genocide, no matter what name we give it?”

After a Tutsi-led rebel group took power after ending the killings, Dr. Des Forges spent four years interviewing organizers and victims of the genocide. She testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania, and at trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada. She also appeared on expert panels convened by the United Nations and what is now the African Union, as well as the French and Belgian legislatures and the United States Congress.

The MacArthur Foundation recognized her work with a $375,000 “genius” grant in 1999. Her authoritative book, “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” was published that year.

On its Web site, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said Dr. Des Forges’ book provides “a meticulously detailed description of the organization of the campaign that killed some half million Tutsi,” adding that it “analyzes the failure of the international community to intervene in the genocide.”

Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University and the author of the book “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda” (2001), called Dr. Des Forges “the leading person who sought to document the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide, so that future generations would have the material on hand to draw the appropriate lessons from it.”

In 2001, after a Belgian court sentenced four Rwandans, two of them Roman Catholic nuns, to long prison terms for their roles in the genocide, Dr. Des Forges said she had been deeply impressed by the proceedings — the first in which a jury of ordinary citizens was asked to sit in judgment of war crimes in another nation.

“People maybe don’t even realize just how revolutionary this jury trial, so far from the events, really is,” she told The Times then. The Belgian trial, she said, “has been done with a great deal more depth than those in Rwanda.”

Dr. Des Forges was also an authority on human rights violations in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire.

While a central focus of her work was documenting the crimes of the Hutu-led government that organized the three-month-long genocide, Dr. Des Forges later leveled strong criticism of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi-led rebel movement headed by Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s president. His government has been in power since the genocide.

Dr. Des Forges was among critics who accused the Kagame government of massacring thousands of Rwandan civilians in 1994, of killing civilians and refugees in the eastern Congo in 1996 and 1997, and of making repeated military interventions in the Congo. The government barred her from entering the country last year.

Alison B. Liebhafsky was born Aug. 20, 1942, in Schenectady, N.Y., the daughter of Herman A. Liebhafsky, a chemist, and Sybil Small. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 and received a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1972, both in history, from Yale.

Her master’s thesis focused on the impact of European colonization on Rwanda’s social system, and her doctoral dissertation was about Yuhi Musinga, the mwami, or ruler, of Rwanda from 1896 to 1931, during which Germany, and later Belgium, colonized Rwanda.

Dr. Des Forges is survived by her husband, Roger V. Des Forges, a historian of China who teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo; a brother, Douglas Small Liebhafsky; a daughter, Jessie Des Forges; a son, Alexander; and three grandchildren.

Dr. Des Forges’ efforts went beyond historical documentation.

Theodore S. Dagne, an Africa analyst for the Congressional Research Service, worked with Dr. Des Forges in Africa and in Washington. On Friday, he recalled how she fought to save the life of a human-rights associate in Rwanda, Monique Mujawamariya.

“On Day 1” of the genocide, Mr. Dagne said, “Alison was calling Monique hour after hour as they were going door to door killing people; Monique tells Alison they are close.”

Ms. Mujawamariya managed to escape by crossing the border.

“Day after day, for months,” Mr. Dagne said, “Alison lobbied everybody she could think of in Kigali and Washington and finally arranged for Monique to come to this country.”

Ms. Mujawamariya now lives in Canada, he said.
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February 05, 2009

Warren Kimbro, Ex-Panther Who Turned to Life of Service After Killing, Dies at 74

Warren Kimbro, Ex-Panther Who Turned to Life of Service After Killing, Dies at 74

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: February 5, 2009
NY Times

Warren Kimbro, who as a fledgling member of the Black Panther Party shot and killed a suspected police informer in New Haven in 1969, prompting a series of trials that made national headlines, but who later earned a Harvard degree and became a respected community leader, died in New Haven on Tuesday. He was 74 and lived in Hamden, Conn.

The cause had not been determined, said his son, Germano. Warren Kimbro had been taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital on Tuesday complaining of chest pains, said Paul Bass, editor of The New Haven Independent, an online news site.

Mr. Kimbro’s story involves an instantaneous tumble from grace and a long climb to regain it. Since 1983, he had run Project MORE, an agency that helps ex-convicts with job training and drug rehabilitation and that advocates for alternatives to jail or prison. It was the centerpiece of Mr. Kimbro’s effort to redeem himself after his crime, said Mr. Bass, who worked with Mr. Kimbro on a book about the 1969 killing, “Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale and the Redemption of a Killer” (Basic Books, 2006).

“Every morning he prayed about it,” Mr. Bass said. “He really wanted to come clean.”

The murder of Alex Rackley, whose body was found in Middlefield, Conn., on May 21, 1969, became a notorious episode in the history of New Haven, which had become home to a chapter of the Black Panthers, an activist group begun in Oakland, Calif., that advocated socialism, believed American blacks were in need of liberation and did not disavow the use of guns in defense of the revolution.

Mr. Rackley, a 24-year-old member of the Panthers from New York City, had been accused of informing the police about the party’s activities. For three days, he had been held by Panthers in Mr. Kimbro’s apartment, where was interrogated and tortured. Eventually Mr. Kimbro and two other men drove Mr. Rackley to a swamp in Middlefield, north of the city, and killed him. Mr. Kimbro pleaded guilty to a murder charge, confessing to firing the first shot into the back of Mr. Rackley’s head. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of 20 years.

While Mr. Rackley was being tortured, the Panthers’ national chairman, Bobby Seale, arrived in New Haven to give a speech at Yale; he was eventually charged with ordering Mr. Rackley’s execution. Mr. Seale’s impending trial generated mass demonstrations in New Haven and a student strike at Yale. The university’s president, Kingman Brewster, famously linked the accusations against Mr. Seale and seven other Panthers to a history of racial injustice, declaring he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”

Mr. Seale was freed in 1971 when his trial ended in a hung jury. Mr. Kimbro, who said he was repentant from the moment he pulled the trigger, testified for the prosecution; he said that Mr. Seale had visited the apartment while Mr. Rackley was there. Mr. Kimbro said he understood that the execution was decreed by Panther officers, but he could not confirm that Mr. Seale gave the order.

“I think Warren Kimbro was an outstanding brother, a person who in the history of that trial got caught up in a bad situation,” Mr. Seale said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Warren Aloysious Kimbro was born in New Haven on April 29, 1934. His father was a factory worker. He did not care for school and never finished high school. He served in the Army during the Korean War, and when he returned to New Haven, he worked odd jobs, including managing a dry cleaner’s store. Later, as the city became a focal point of a national experiment in urban renewal, he became active in antipoverty and neighborhood planning programs.

It was his frustration with the bureaucracies of the groups he worked for, and their limited effectiveness, that led him to join the Black Panthers in 1969, offering the apartment he shared with his wife and children as local party headquarters. At 35, he was older than most of the men who were his compatriots, and he had been a party member for only six months when he killed Mr. Rackley. Later he would say he feared for his own life if he did not carry out the killing.

In prison, he counseled other inmates, edited the newspaper and was “more than a model prisoner,” Richard Hills, warden of the Brooklyn Correctional Institution in Connecticut, told The New York Times in 1973. On work release, he became director of a youth drug counseling program, returning to his cell at night, and earned a highly unusual reduction of his minimum sentence — to 41/2 years. When his parole requirements were satisfied, he entered Harvard as a student in social work at the Graduate School of Education. Later he became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State University.

In addition to his son, who lives in New Haven, Mr. Kimbro is survived by a brother, Joseph, also of New Haven; a daughter, Veronica, of Brookline, Mass.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

“I was just a kid out there who didn’t know how to handle himself, and it was a slap in the face with cold, hard reality that turned me around back to what I was,” Mr. Kimbro said in 1973, reflecting on his crime and punishment in an interview with The New York Times. “I’d lie awake in my cell at night trying to figure out what makes me tick, and I succeeded. I’m now what I was before 1969.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/nyregion/05kimbro.html

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January 01, 2009

Helen Suzman, Anti-Apartheid Leader, Dies at 91

"She was also remembered for efforts to ease p[prison conditions for Mr. Mandela and other political captives, ensuring that they were able to receive books."

January 2, 2009
Helen Suzman, Anti-Apartheid Leader, Dies at 91
By ALAN COWELL and CELIA W. DUGGER
NY Times
Helen Suzman, the internationally known anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, died on Thursday, a family member said.. She was 91.

Her son-in-law, Jeffrey Jowell, said she died peacefully in her Johannesburg home after a brief illness. He did not specify the cause of death.Mrs. Suzman was for many years among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to the injustices of racial rule. But, while she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change and differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa supportive of economic sanctions to pressure the country’s white rulers toward reform.

“I understand the moral abhorrence, and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate,” she told a New York audience in 1986, at a time when some Americans favored sanctions. “But I don’t see how wrecking the economy of the country will insure a more stable and just society.”

Her stance angered some Americans.

On American campuses, she said in an interview at the time, “I think people were probably rather disappointed by my attitude.”

A diminutive, spry, elegant and often acerbic politician, Mrs. Suzman became her country’s longest-serving legislator, pressing for changes from the benches of the whites-only Parliament for 36 years before she retired from the assembly in 1989. For 13 of those years, she was the sole parliamentary representative of the Progressive Party, the only party to reject racial discrimination. The party initially promoted only a limited franchise for the black majority but later embraced the idea of universal suffrage, Prof. Jowell said in a telephone interview.

After stepping down from Parliament, she created a pro-democracy foundation.

In the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994, she acted as an election commissioner. The ballot spelled the formal demise of apartheid and brought Mr. Mandela to power as the country’s first black president.

The ruling African National Congress paid tribute to Mrs. Suzman saying she “became a thorn in the flesh of apartheid by openly criticizing segregation of Blacks by a Whites-only apartheid system.”

In her lifetime, her campaigning drew wide acknowledgment from academic institutions. Harvard, Columbia and Brandeis were among 26 South African and overseas universities that awarded her honorary doctorates. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II made her an honorary Dame of the British Empire — the female equivalent of a knighthood in 1989. In 1997, Mr. Mandela bestowed on her one of South Africa’s highest civilian honors — the Order of Meritorious Service (Gold).

Virtually to the end of her life, she remained a critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing. Only this month, she joined a growing list of well-known South Africans asking for a new inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s.

Mrs. Suzman “seems never to have been content to fight her battle against apartheid only in Parliament,” Vincent Crapanzano, an author, wrote in a review of her memoir, “In No Uncertain Terms,” published in New York in 1993.

“She took advantage of her status as an M.P. to gain access to prisons, resettlement areas, black townships and homelands barred to ordinary white South Africans,” Mr. Crapanzano wrote. “She visited Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and countless other political prisoners, and was able to argue with some success for prison reform. She did this by describing in Parliament what she observed, enabling the liberal press to publish what would otherwise have been censored, for what was said in Parliament was not subject to censorship.”

She was also remembered for efforts to ease p[prison conditions for Mr. Mandela and other political captives, ensuring that they were able to receive books.

Mrs. Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on Nov. 17, 1917, in Germiston, a gold-mining town outside Johannesburg, a descendant of Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to South Africa. Educated in a Roman Catholic school in Johannesburg, she married Moses Suzman, a doctor, in 1937.

For many years, Mrs. Suzman lived a life of privilege common to wealthier white South Africans used to servants and big homes. Indeed, in 1994, she signed a reader’s letter to The New York Times defending the way many whites treated their domestic staff.

“Most employers in South Africa treat their live-in domestics with consideration,” she wrote. “Weekly half-days and alternate Sundays are accepted minimum ‘off-times,’ and so are paid annual holidays. Many employers assist their domestics to educate their children, especially as there are a great number of one-parent families. Many domestics are regarded as members of the families for whom they have worked for years.”

She traced her opposition to apartheid to her university years when she studied racial laws that incensed her, particularly the so-called “pass laws” defining where and how black people in South Africa could live. Even in a favored vacation resort — Plettenberg Bay on South Africa’s southern coast — she campaigned to improve the status of non-white residents living in a nearby segregated township. She once said she was driven by a profound dislike of bullying.

Mrs. Suzman first visited Mr. Mandela in the Robben Island prison, just off Cape Town, in 1967, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964.

Reuters reported that Mr. Mandela, remembering her first visit with him in B-Section of the prison, once said: “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”

The Nelson Mandela Foundation on Thursday that said South Africa had lost a “great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid.”

She ran for Parliament in the up-market and whites-only Houghton district of Johannesburg and remained a legislator from 1953 to 1989. First elected to represent the United Party, she was a founder of the liberal Progressive Party, which favored a more inclusive franchise, and was its sole parliamentary representative from 1961 to 1974.

According to Mr. Crapanzano, she was heckled and verbally abused in Parliament for her gender, liberal politics and religious roots, labeled “the lady from Lithuania,” a “sickly humanist” and a “dangerous subversive.”

Her nemesis was P. W. Botha, South Africa’s penultimate white president, who accused her of supporting “people who want to bring this country to its knees,” Reuters reported. She once said that if Mr. Botha had been “female he would arrive in Parliament on a broomstick.”

The outside world saw her in a different light than many of her fellow white lawmakers and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Celia W. Dugger reported from Cape Town, South Africa, and Alan Cowell from London.

Posted by lois at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2008

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

December 3, 2008- NY Times
Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
By TIM WEINER

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.

Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.”

Odetta sang at the march on Washington, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, in August 1963. Her song that day was “O Freedom,” dating to slavery days: “O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word.” “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.”

Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later, Odetta discovered that she could sing.

“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”

She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.

“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.

In a 2005 National Public Radio interview, she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

In 1950, Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.

She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair.

Her voice plunged deep and soared high, and her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” resonated with an audience hearing old songs made new.

Bob Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” It was her first, and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Water Boy,” “ ’Buked and Scorned.”

Her blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”

Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But after King was assassinated in 1968, the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Odetta the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities.

Odetta was married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983 to pursue his performing career.

She was singing and performing well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong.

In April 2007, half a century after Bob Dylan first heard her, she was on stage at a Carnegie Hall tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.

Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”

The critic called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76

November 11, 2008
An Appraisal
Taking Africa With Her to the World
By JON PARELES

To be the voice of a nation speaking to the wider world is a tough mission for any performer. To be the voice of an entire continent is exponentially more difficult. Both were mantles that the South African singer Miriam Makeba took on willingly and forcefully. Despite her lifelong claim that she was not a political singer, she became “Mama Africa” with an activist’s tenacity and a musician’s ear. She died Sunday, at 76, after a concert in Italy.

Treating her listeners as one global community, Ms. Makeba sang in any language she chose, from her own Xhosa to the East African lingua franca Swahili to Portuguese to Yiddish. She also took sides: against South African apartheid and for a worldwide movement against racism, to the point of derailing her career when she married the black power advocate Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s. (They were divorced in the mid-1970s.) Even during three decades of life as an exile and expatriate — the South African government revoked her passport in 1960 — she made it clear that South Africa was her home and her bedrock as an artist.

Her voice, more properly voices, were unstoppable. Always cosmopolitan, Ms. Makeba knew her Billie Holiday as well as old Xhosa melodies like “The Click Song,” with its percussive syllables, which became one of her international hits. She could sound light, lilting and girlish; she could be flirtatious, bluesy or utterly exuberant. Her voice also held a layer of rawer, sharper exhortation: the tone of village songs and spirit invocations, the traditions that were her birthright — songs she revisited on her 1988 album “Sangoma” (Warner Brothers). Her huge repertory didn’t feature strident protest songs but in love songs and lullabies, party songs and calls for unity there was an indomitable will to survive: a joyful tenacity that could translate as both deep cultural memory and immediate defiance.

She must have been an exotic apparition in the 1960s, upbeat and already a star in South Africa, wowing Europe and then arriving in the United States with support from Harry Belafonte. She had already, bravely, sung in an anti-apartheid documentary, “Come Back, Africa.” In exile she was still an ambassador, showing America and the world an Africa full of vibrant, irresistible sounds: the loping mbube grooves that Paul Simon would rediscover decades later, the flow of African words, the grain of her voice.

Videos on YouTube from 1966 show Ms. Makeba, with her musicians in jackets and ties, performing in an elegant long dress that also happens to have a leopard-skin pattern: supper-club Africana that’s at home on any continent. Her music was different but not forbidding, especially with her own charisma to introduce it. Before anyone was tossing around terms like “world music,” she was creating it, making her heritage portable while preserving its essence.

She was never a purist, but always proud of her roots.

Ms. Makeba arrived during America’s civil-rights struggles and performed at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches. A visible reminder that discrimination stretched beyond the United States, she denounced apartheid in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1963. It’s impossible to guess what she may have been thinking when she sang her 1967 “Pata Pata,” with its bits of English narration — “ ‘Pata Pata’ is the name of a dance we do down Johannesburg way” — in the full knowledge that she herself would not be welcome back in Johannesburg until a regime change.

Prohibited from returning to South Africa, she settled instead in Guinea, in West Africa, where she participated in that country’s government-assisted movement toward musical “authenticité” — merging traditional styles with new instruments — and let her repertory stretch further. For a while she also joined Guinea’s United Nations delegation.

Ms. Makeba didn’t have the career of a pop singer, thinking about hits and trends and markets. She followed conscience and history instead, becoming a symbol of integrity and pan-Africanism — lending her imprimatur, for instance, by performing on Mr. Simon’s 1987 “Graceland” tour, which carried South African music worldwide while implicitly pointing to the apartheid that still prevailed at home. Through five decades of making music, down to her final studio album, “Reflections,” in 2004 and concerts till the day she died, she sang with a voice that was unmistakably African, and just as unmistakably fearless.

November 11, 2008
Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76
By ALAN COWELL
NY Times
LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.

The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to Vincenza Di Saia, a physician at the private Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno near Naples in southern Italy, where she was brought by ambulance. The time of death was listed in hospital records as midnight, the doctor said.

Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.

Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.

Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Mandela said the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation.”

He continued: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”

“She was South Africa’s first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours,” Mr. Mandela’s was one of many tributes from South African leaders.

“One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,” Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement. “Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.”

For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations. “I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. “I never committed any crime.”

Music was a central part of the struggle against apartheid. The South African authorities of the era exercised strict censorship of many forms of expression, while many foreign entertainers discouraged performances in South Africa in an attempt to isolate the white authorities and show their opposition to apartheid.

From exile she acted as a constant reminder of the events in her homeland as the white authorities struggled to contain or pre-empt unrest among the black majority.

Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”

She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.

In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.

But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.

In one of her last interviews, in May 2008 with the British music critic Robin Denselow, she said she found her concerts in the United States being cancelled. “It was not a ban from the government. It was a cancellation by people who felt I should not be with Stokely because he was a rebel to them. I didn’t care about that. He was somebody I loved, who loved me, and it was my life,” she said.

Ms. Makeba was born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a father from the Xhosa people who live mainly in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. She became known to South Africans in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg in the 1950s.

According to Agence France-Presse, she was often short of money and could not afford to buy a coffin when her only daughter in 1985. She buried her alone, barring a handful of journalists from covering the funeral.

She was particularly renowned for her performances of songs such as what was known as the Click Song — named for a clicking sound in her native tongue — or “Qongoqothwane,” and Pata Pata, meaning Touch Touch in Xhosa. Her style of singing was widely interpreted as a blend of black township rhythms, jazz and folk music.

In her interview in 2008, Ms. Makeba said: “I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.”

In a tribute, Jacob Zuma, head of the ruling African National Congress, said the party “dips its banner in tribute to an African heroine, Miriam Zenzile Makeba, a freedom fighter and outstanding African cultural figure.”

“Miriam Makeba used her voice, not merely to entertain, but to give a voice to the millions of oppressed South Africans under the yoke of apartheid,” Mr. Zuma said.

Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg and Rachel Donadio from Rome.

Posted by lois at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2008

Rachel King, 45, anti-death penalty activist

Rachel King, 45, anti-death penalty activist
By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Created 08/27/2008 - 09:23

Rachel Carol King, 45, of Washington, D.C., formerly of Northampton, died Monday, Aug. 25, surrounded by family and friends at her summer home in Wayne, Maine. She had lived fully while coping with breast cancer and its treatment for the last five years.

The daughter of Jill Howes and Charles H. King, Rachel was born July 2, 1963, in Enid, Okla. Her family moved to Wayne, Maine, shortly after her birth.

She graduated from Smith College in 1985, after which she worked in Northampton, Mass., at the Girl Scouts of America for several years. During that time she was a political activist and was involved in the Sanctuary Movement and many other peace and social justice causes, including as a volunteer and intern with the American Friends Service Committee.

She graduated from the Northeastern University School of Law in 1990 and later earned a master's of law degree from Temple University. When she died, she was enrolled in a master's degree program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

Rachel had a long and distinguished legal career. After law school, she worked for the Alaska Public Defender's office as an assistant public defender, and she helped found and was the first executive director of Alaskans Against the Death Penalty, successfully keeping Alaska death-penalty free. She served as executive director of the Alaska Civil Liberties Union and was active in the Green Party in Alaska and in other human rights causes.

For many years she worked as a legislative counsel and lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., during which time she fought tirelessly in support of civil liberties and was instrumental in limiting the scope of the USA Patriot Act. She was also an instructor of legal writing and research at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Most recently Rachel worked as legal counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on crime and homeland security.

Rachel was a longtime Quaker, and was a dedicated and passionate opponent of the death penalty. She served as chairwoman of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) , and authored two books on the subject: "Don't Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak out Against the Death Penalty," and "Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories." In July Rachel was notified that she was to be honored with a lifetime achievement award from the NCADP, given to people who have devoted their lives to abolition of the death penalty.

She was an avid photographer and long-distance runner, competing in more than a dozen marathons. She was a founding member of the Takoma Village Co-housing Community in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2000, where she lived at the time of her death. She is the author of the novel, "Tales of the District," about life in a co-housing community.

In addition to her mother and father, she leaves her husband, Richard G. McAlee, whom she married in 2005, and his three daughters, Lauren, Julia, and Livia; two brothers, Charles K. King and Paul A. King; her stepfather, David Rogers; her niece Katy, and Katy's mother Kim; two nephews, one aunt, and many cousins.

A service celebrating Rachel's life will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 31, at the Wayne Community Church. An additional service will be held in Washington, D.C. on a date to be announced.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Rachel's name to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, www.ncadp.org [1], and in support of breast cancer research to "Dr. Leisha Emens at Johns Hopkins Hospital," 1650 Orleans St., Room 409, Baltimore, MD 21231-1000.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/08/27/rachel-king-45-anti-death-penalty-activist

Posted by lois at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

Del Martin (1921 - 2008)

Del Martin
August 27, 2008

Associated Press, by LISA LEFF:

Del Martin, a pioneering lesbian rights activist who with her lifelong partner became a symbol for the movement to legalize gay marriage, died Wednesday morning. (August 27, 2008) She was 87.

Martin died at a San Francisco hospital two weeks after a broken arm exacerbated her existing health problems, according to Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Her partner of more than 55 years and wife of just over two months, Phyllis Lyon, was with her.

"Ever since I met Del 55 years ago, I could never imagine a day would come when she wouldn't be by my side," Lyon, 83, said in a statement Wednesday.

"I also never imagined there would be a day that we would actually be able to get married," she added. "I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed."

Martin and Lyon exchanged vows at San Francisco City Hall on June 16, the first day same-sex couples could legally wed in California, after being together for more than half a century.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who officiated the wedding, singled them out to be the first gay couple to be declared "spouses for life" in the city in recognition of their long relationship and their status as pioneers of the gay rights movement.

"The greatest way we can honor the life work of Del Martin, is to continue to fight and never give up, until we have achieved equality for all," Newsom said Wednesday.

The couple, who in 1955 co-founded the nation's first outspoken advocacy group for lesbians, Daughters of Bilitis, similarly served as the public faces of the marriage debate four years earlier, when Newsom in 2004 challenged California's one man-one woman marriage laws by directing city officials to issue licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Their marriage, along with those of almost 4,000 other couples, were invalidated later by the California Supreme Court.

The action laid the groundwork for a series of lawsuits that ultimately led a 4-3 majority of the same court on May 15 to strike down the state's gay marriage ban. Martin and Lyon were two of the original plaintiffs.

"We would not have marriage equality in California if it weren't for Del and Phyllis. They fought and triumphed in many battles," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. "Through it all, their love and commitment to each other was an inspiration to all who knew them."

An imposing and uncompromising figure, Martin in 1970 wrote an influential article for the Advocate magazine that criticized what she saw as the gay rights movement's persistent chauvinism. The schism, which mirrored the increasing cultural influence of the women's movement, eventually prompted Lyon and Martin to adopt feminism and racism among their causes.

Trained as journalists, they together wrote "Lesbian/Woman," a landmark 1972 book in which they tried to make the point that lesbians should be seen for more than their sexuality and simultaneously offered a frank, no-nonsense account of lesbian relationships.

A year later, Martin became the first out lesbian to serve on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women, a position she won despite opposition within the feminist organization. Critics in the group feared the impact of having a leader that many in the mainstream still viewed as socially deviant.

Born as Dorothy Taliaferro on May 5, 1921, in San Francisco, Martin acquired the surname she would use the rest of her life from her four-year marriage to her college sweetheart, James Martin. They had a daughter, Kendra, before they divorced.

In "Lesbian/Woman," Martin recounted that the growing realization that she was attracted to women initially sparked thoughts of suicide. She eventually worked through her feelings despite the discrimination and threat of arrest gay people faced during the conservative 1950s.

When she started working for a construction trade publication in Seattle, she carried a briefcase without worrying whether it made her appear manly. The briefcase was the first thing Lyon noticed about her future spouse, she always recounted in stories about how the two met.

"Ultimately, it gets down to self-acceptance. If you accept yourself, you don't give a damn what anyone else thinks," Martin said in "No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon," Joan Biren's 2003 documentary about the couple.

Martin is survived by Lyon; her daughter, Kendra Mon, a son-in-law, two grandchildren and her sister-in-law.

In Martin's honor, Newsom ordered the American flags at City Hall and the rainbow flag in the Castro District, the heart of the city's gay and lesbian community, to be flown at half-staff until sundown Thursday. Plans for a public memorial are pending.

August 28, 2008
Del Martin, Lesbian Activist, Dies at 87
By WILLIAM GRIMES-NY Times

Del Martin, who married her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon, on June 16 in the first legal gay union in California and who helped found the pioneering lesbian-rights group the Daughters of Bilitis, died Wednesday in San Francisco. She was 87.

The cause was a broken arm that exacerbated her existing health problems, Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told The Associated Press.

The June wedding was not the couple’s first effort at legalizing their union. In February 2004, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco challenged California’s marriage laws by announcing that the city would issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples who requested them. Of the more than 4,000 couples who married before the California Supreme Court intervened a month later, Ms. Martin and Ms. Lyon may have been the oldest, and were certainly first and the most celebrated.

That summer, though, the California Supreme Court invalidated all licenses for same-sex marriages, arguing that the mayor had exceeded his legal authority. Ms. Martin and Ms. Lyon were among the original plaintiffs in a series of lawsuits that led to the court’s declaring same-sex marriages legal this year.

Mr. Newsom invited the couple to be the first couple to marry under the new ruling. This they did, in San Francisco’s City Hall, after living together as a couple for more than half a century.

On Wednesday, Ms. Lyon, 83, said in a statement, “I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed.”

Ms. Martin was born Dorothy L. Taliaferro on May 5, 1921, in San Francisco. She studied journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State College. At 19 she married James Martin, but the marriage ended in divorce four years later. Their daughter, Kendra Mon, survives, as do two grandchildren and Ms. Lyon.

While working for a construction trade journal in Seattle, Ms. Martin met Ms. Lyon, an employee at the same firm, and the two became romantically involved and entered into a permanent relationship in 1953. In 1955, having moved to San Francisco, they joined with six other women to found the Daughters of Bilitis, the first social and political organization for lesbians in the United States, which soon established branches around the country. The name was taken from “Songs of Bilitis,” a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louys.

Ms. Martin was the organization’s first president, and from 1960 to 1962 she edited its newsletter, The Ladder, which Ms. Lyon had edited from its inception in 1956. The organization disbanded in 1970 as more radical lesbian groups came to the fore.

In 1964 Ms. Martin helped found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which lobbied city government to end police harassment of gay men and lesbians and change discriminatory laws.

Ms. Martin is believed to have been the first openly gay woman to be elected to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women, where she agitated to put lesbian issues on the table. She was also an active member of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, which was founded in 1972 to support gay candidates in San Francisco.

In her later years, she was a member of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. In 1987 she earned a degree from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

She wrote a book, “Battered Wives” (1976), and two others with Ms. Lyon, “Lesbian/Woman” (1972) and “Lesbian Love and Liberation” (1973).

Posted by lois at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2008

Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead

June 7, 2008
Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead
By DENNIS HEVESI
New York Times

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50.

No cause has been determined, her sister, Beth Johnson, said, while pointing out that her sister had been born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease. “She never wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis was,” Beth Johnson said.

The condition did not stop Harriet Johnson from earning a law degree, representing the disabled in court, lobbying legislators and writing books and articles that argued, as she did in The New York Times Magazine in February 2003, “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”

Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

Rolling into an auditorium at the College of Charleston on April 22, 2001, Ms. Johnson went to the microphone during a question-and-answer session to confront Peter Singer, a philosopher from Princeton, who was giving a lecture titled “Rethinking Life and Death.”

Professor Singer had drawn protests by insisting that suffering should be relieved without regard to species. That, he said, allows parents and doctors to kill newborns with drastic disabilities, like the absence of higher brain function or an incompletely formed spine, instead of letting “nature take its course.”

In Professor Singer’s view, infants, like other animals, are neither rational nor self-conscious.

“Since their species is not relevant to their moral status,” he said, “the principles that govern the wrongness of killing nonhuman animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here, too.”

Ms. Johnson had been sent to the lecture by Not Dead Yet, a national disability-rights organization. Describing the event in The Times, she wrote: “To Singer, it’s pretty simple: disability makes a person ‘worse off.’ Are we ‘worse off’? I don’t think so.”

She added: “We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own.”

An e-mail exchange followed that encounter in Charleston, leading to an invitation to debate Professor Singer at Princeton on March 25, 2002. Their two encounters were the subject of the 8,000-word Times article, which brought Ms. Johnson considerable attention in the disability rights movement and from the general public.

“Her impact came mostly from her writing,” said Laura Hershey, a disability rights activist with several organizations, including Not Dead Yet. “Millions of people by now have read that article, and it was reprinted in her book. Dozens of people who read the article told me, ‘Wow, I never thought about it that way.’ ”

Ms. Johnson’s memoir, “Too Late to Die Young,” was published in 2005. Her novel, “Accidents of Nature,” about a girl with cerebral palsy who had never known another disabled person until she went to camp, was published in 2006.

Born in Laurinburg, N.C., on July 8, 1957, Ms. Johnson was one of five children of David and Ada Johnson. Her parents taught foreign languages at colleges. Besides her parents and her sister, Ms. Johnson is survived by three brothers, Eric, McBryde and Ross.

The fact that her parents could afford hired help was a salient point in another Times Magazine article Ms. Johnson wrote in November 2003, “The Disability Gulag.” Describing institutions where “wheelchair people are lined up, obviously stuck where they’re placed” while “a TV blares, watched by no one,” she called for a major shift from institutionalizing people to publicly financing home care provided by family, friends or neighbors.

“I sometimes dare to dream that the gulag will be gone in a generation or two,” she wrote. “But meanwhile, the lost languish in the gulag.”

Early on, Ms. Johnson was a troublemaker. At 14, at a school for the disabled, her sister said, “Harriet tried to get an abusive teacher fired; the start of her hell raising.” In her memoir, Ms. Johnson describes how, after watching a Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon while in her teens, she turned against “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics.”

Ms. Johnson graduated from Charleston Southern University in 1978, then earned a master’s degree in public administration from the College of Charleston. She graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1985 and soon went into private practice.

Humor laced her writing. The “crippled children’s school” she attended as a teenager, she wrote in a Times Op-Ed article in December 2006, once considered staging a play based on Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” But who would be Tiny Tim?

Ms. Johnson quoted directly from the Dickens book: “Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!”

“Alas!” Ms. Johnson exclaimed. “A little crutch! An iron frame! In our world, the crutch-and-brace kids were the athletic elite. They picked up the stuff we hard-core crips dropped.”

Posted by lois at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2008

William P. Ford, 72, Rights Advocate, Dies

June 3, 2008
William P. Ford, 72, Rights Advocate, Dies
By DENNIS HEVESI

William P. Ford, a former Wall Street lawyer who spent more than two decades seeking to bring high-ranking military officials to justice after his sister and three other American churchwomen were murdered in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, died on Sunday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 72.

The cause was esophageal cancer, his son William Ford III said.

Mr. Ford’s efforts eventually led to a $54.6 million liability ruling against two former Salvadoran generals in a 2002 civil trial in Florida, where the generals were living after being granted residence by the United States.

Although the ruling was not directly connected to the murders of Mr. Ford’s sister and the other women, it resulted largely from his long and tenacious campaign. The federal court jury found José Guillermo García, El Salvador’s former defense minister, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, its former National Guard commander, liable for lasting injuries suffered by three Salvadoran immigrants to the United States who were tortured under the generals’ command.

“We pursued the case, with Bill in the lead,” Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First, said on Monday. “In an extraordinary way, he went beyond simply grieving the loss of his sister; he became a leading advocate for justice in El Salvador.”

Mr. Ford had been an influential figure in the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which in 2004 became Human Rights First.

On the night of Dec. 2, 1980, shortly after the start of El Salvador’s civil war, Mr. Ford’s sister, Ita , a Maryknoll sister; another member of the same order, Maura Clarke; the Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel; and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan, were abducted, raped and shot to death. The next day, peasants discovered their bodies beside an isolated road and buried them in a common grave. The van they had been driving when they were stopped at a military checkpoint turned up 20 miles away, burned and gutted.

The killings came as the United States was beginning a decade-long, $7 billion aid effort to prevent left-wing guerrillas from coming to power in El Salvador, and the case quickly became the focus of a bitter policy debate about Central America.

“This particular act of barbarism,” a 1993 State Department report said, “did more to inflame the debate over El Salvador in the United States than any other single incident.”

In 1984, four national guardsmen were convicted of murder in El Salvador and were sentenced to 30 years in prison. After 17 years of silence, the guardsmen said they had acted after receiving “orders from above.” Their admissions were made to a delegation from the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, including Mr. Ford.

For years, Mr. Ford lobbied politicians and made speeches, charging that the Salvadoran government had failed to conduct even a rudimentary investigation into the murders. In 1981, he pressed his case with the American ambassador to El Salvador, Dean Hinton, and the Salvadoran president, José Napoleón Duarte.

Mr. Ford also criticized the Reagan administration. The government, he said, “is so obsessed with the East-West confrontation that they are willing to tolerate the murder of American citizens in El Salvador.” The Salvadoran junta had killed more than 30,000 people, he said.

It was an unusual stance for a lawyer who had been on the staff of the New York law firm where Richard M. Nixon and John Mitchell had worked before Mr. Nixon became president and Mr. Mitchell became the attorney general. A year after his sister’s murder, Mr. Ford said he had been “radicalized” by American support for a government “which is no more than a group of gangsters in uniform.”

William Patrick Ford was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on April 28, 1936, the son of William and Mildred O’Beirne Ford. Besides his son William, Mr. Ford is survived by his wife of 47 years, the former Mary Anne Heyman; another son, John; four daughters, Miriam Ford, Ruth Ford, Elizabeth Ford and Rebecca Ford; a sister, Irene Coriaty; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Ford graduated from Fordham University in 1960 and earned his law degree at St. John’s University in 1966. He was a law clerk to a federal judge and later a founding partner of the law firm Ford Marrin Esposito Witmeyer & Gleser.

Litigating securities and product-liability cases took a back seat for Mr. Ford after that day in 1980. Of the American government, he said a year later, “You can’t take seriously the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty if at the same time you are sending arms, ammunition, trucks and police equipment to a junta which is murdering its own citizens.”

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79

June 3, 2008
Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79
By BEN RATLIFF
NY Times

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.

In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.

His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Mr. Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat.

“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall.

In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”

Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson. After the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel, who had three children of her own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas studied classical violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when a family member gave him an acoustic model.

He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass. The group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Jody Williams, then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.

The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board sprinkled with sand.

Mr. Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the early days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn professional.

In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men who were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”

That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one.

In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” “Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart.

Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A-Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.

Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play “Sixteen Tons,” the song popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.

For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model 60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock spring.

His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.

“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.

Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against intermarriage.

During the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.

But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr. Diddley moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974.

His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical importance.

Since the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.

The last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.

Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

“I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at her real good.”

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

Jesse Boyar---Long-time fighter for prisoners

Below is an obituary notice for Jesse Boyar, long-time fighter for prisoners and against the prison system. Jesse's son Patrick spent many many years in the Corcoran SHU but last week Jesse told me that he was relieved that Patrick, who is doing 25-life on a 3rd strike of petty theft with a prior, was transferred to Pleasant Valley State Prison and was doing much better. Jesse was active in FACTS and Extend a Hand for Justice in Bakersfield. For years, Jesse would picket outside Corcoran wearing his VFW cap and sash, greeting visitors to the prison and recruiting them to the work.
****************************************************************
Our Comrade, Jesse Boyar passed away today, but be sure, the brother was not on his knees!! Jesse was a fighter without any intention of laying down.

He came to L.A. for an April 16th action in front of the Governor's office less than two weeks ago with a van load of members from Bakersfield FACTS . At that time he told me that he tho't he was a goner a few days earlier but all I saw was the same feisty man who wouldn't back up from a fight. Like our brother Leon, who left us in 2006, Jesse is the promise of that better, more just society we are fighting so hard to build. I can see them now strategizing our future!!

We've lost a friend, a warrior, a role model and a father whose fight for his son Patrick will be carried on by all Striker families, all prisoner families, all who understand that people are not born to be caged. We will miss you, brother Jesse.
geri silva
FACTS Education Fund
Families to Amend California's Three Strikes

Posted by lois at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2008

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

March 31, 2008
Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

But despite frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith, on Oct. 3, 1979, escaped over the Thai border. Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events. In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, a rabbi murdered in 1990.

Outside The Times, Mr. Dith spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before students, senior citizens and other groups. “I’m a one-person crusade,” he said.

Dith Pran was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a provincial town near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat. His father was a public-works official.

Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Mr. Dith was hired as a translator for the United States Military Assistance Command. When Cambodia severed ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.

In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighboring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Mr. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. When working for Mr. Schanberg, he taught himself to take pictures.

When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of recreating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.

To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.

Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.

In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.

The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.

He had an emotional reunion with his wife, Ser Moeun Dith, and four children in San Francisco. Though he and his wife later divorced, she was by his bedside in his last weeks, bringing him rice noodles.

Mr. Dith was either separated or divorced from his second wife, Kim DePaul, Mr. Schanberg said.

Mr. Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.

Ms. DePaul now runs the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which spreads word about the Cambodian genocide. At his death, Mr. Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organization to help Cambodia. In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children.

Dr. Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Mr. Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.

“It seems like I lost one hand,” Mr. Dith said of Dr. Ngor’s death.

Mr. Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere.

“One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2008

Henrietta Bell Wells, a Pioneering Debater, Dies at 96

March 12, 2008
Henrietta Bell Wells, a Pioneering Debater, Dies at 96
By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times

Henrietta Bell Wells, the only woman, the only freshman and the last surviving member of the 1930 Wiley College debate team that participated in the first interracial collegiate debate in the United States, died on Feb. 27 in Baytown, Tex. She was 96.

Her friend Edward Cox confirmed the death.

The story of the team, called the Great Debaters in last year’s movie of the same name, began in 1924 at Wiley College, a small liberal arts college in Marshall, Tex., founded a half century earlier by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate “newly freed men.”

Melvin B. Tolson arrived at the all-black school that autumn to teach English and other subjects. He also started a debate team.

Mr. Tolson, who would win wide distinction as a poet, saw argumentation as a way to cultivate mental alertness. Wiley was soon debating and defeating black colleges two and three times its size.

In 1930, Mr. Tolson decided to break new ground. He managed to schedule a debate with the University of Michigan Law School, an all-white school. Wiley won. Other debates with white schools followed, culminating with Wiley’s 1935 victory over the national champion, the University of Southern California.

Mr. Tolson’s stunningly successful debate team was portrayed in “The Great Debaters,” directed by Denzel Washington. Describing the cinematic young debaters in The Chicago Sun-Times, the critic Roger Ebert wrote, “They are black, proud, single-minded, focused, and they express all this most dramatically in their debating.”

In the fall of 1930, Henrietta Bell, who would later marry Wallace Wells, was a freshman in an English class taught by Mr. Tolson. The professor urged her to try out for the debate team, because she seemed to be able to think on her feet. She was the first woman on the team.

In an interview with The Houston Chronicle in 2007, she said the boys “didn’t seem to mind me.”

But the work was far from easy. Miss Bell attended classes during the day, had three campus jobs and practiced debating at night. The intensity of debating was reflected in Mr. Tolson’s characterization of it as “a blood sport.”

But the hard work paid off. In the interview with The Chronicle, Mrs. Wells declared, “We weren’t intimidated.”

Henrietta Pauline Bell was born on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in Houston on Jan. 11, 1912, and raised by a hard-pressed single mother from the West Indies. When riots broke out in 1917 over police treatment of black soldiers at a World War I training camp, the family’s house was searched. Mrs. Wells recalled being unable to try on clothes in segregated stores.

She did not debate in high school but was valedictorian of her class. She earned a modest scholarship from the Y.M.C.A. to go to Wiley, Episcopal Life reported.

In the spring of 1930, Miss Bell, her teammates and her chaperone arrived at the Seventh Street Theater in Chicago. It was the largest black-owned theater in town, because no large white-owned facility would admit a racially mixed audience, according to an article in The Marshall News-Messenger. Mrs. Wells remembered a standing-room-only crowd.

She wore a dark suit and had her hair cut in a boyish bob. In an interview with Jeffrey Porro, one of the screenwriters of “The Great Debaters,” she felt very small on that very big stage. “I had to use my common sense,” she said.

She remembered Mr. Tolson urging her to punch up her delivery. “You’ve got to put something in there to wake the people up,” he had said.

Mrs. Wells told The Chronicle, “It was a nondecision debate, but we felt at the time that it was a giant step toward desegregation.”

She debated for only one year, because of the need to work for money. She kept up with drama, which Mr. Tolson also coached. After graduating from college, she returned to Houston, where she met Mr. Wells and married. He was a church organist and later an Episcopal minister. She worked as a teacher and social worker.

Mrs. Wells advised Mr. Washington on the movie, using her scrapbooks as visual aids. She urged him to play Mr. Tolson, something he at first was not inclined to do. He called her “another grandma.”

Mr. Wells died in 1987. Mrs. Wells left no immediate survivors.

Her advice to today’s students was straightforward: “Learn to speak well and learn to express yourself effectively.”

She learned this lesson directly from Mr. Tolson, whom she called her crabbiest and best teacher. He was known for issuing intellectual challenges immediately upon entering the classroom.

A typical salutation: “Bell! What is a verb?”

Posted by lois at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2008

Western MA: Man sentenced to Hampden County Jail for Drug Possession Hangs Himself

Westfield man hangs self in jail
Thursday, March 06, 2008
By GEORGE GRAHAM
Springfield Republican
LUDLOW - A 41-year-old Westfield man hanged himself on Tuesday at the Hampden County Correctional Center.

Kevin J. Small, of Westfield, hanged himself with a bed sheet that he had tied to the top bunk in his cell, said Richard J. McCarthy, spokesman for the Hampden County Sheriff's Department.

A corrections officer discovered Small hanging from the bunk at 5:35 p.m. and immediately cut him down, McCarthy said.

Facility medical personnel worked to revive him, but to no avail, McCarthy said.

Outside paramedics joined the effort at about 5:50 and Small was pronounced dead at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield at about 6:35 p.m., McCarthy said.

Small's death, as with all correctional facility deaths, was investigated by state police detectives, McCarthy said.

Small had been alone in his cell. Although his cell door had been unlocked, there was no evidence that anybody else had played a role in his death, McCarthy said.

The unit's on-duty officer is expected to make rounds every 30 minutes. Electronic and video information verified that he had done so.

McCarthy said Small was serving time for drug possession.

Small was screened at the start of his sentence, and there was no indication that he might be suicidal, McCarthy said.

Small was in a special unit for short-term inmates deemed to be low risk. He was serving the 14th day of a 90-day term, McCarthy said.

The unit, McCarthy said, was not crowded. It has a capacity of 77. Small had been one of 54 inmates there.

The facility has had other suicides, one in January 2006 and another in April 2003, McCarthy said. http://www.masslive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-13/1204791655257180.xml&coll=1

©2008 The Republican
© 2008 MassLive.com All Rights Reserved.

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February 26, 2008

Mrs. Johnnie Carr, 97, Is Dead. Civil Rights Leader

“Look back, but march forward,” Mrs. Carr urged the huge crowd of young people.

February 26, 2008
Johnnie Carr, 97, Is Dead; Was Active in Bus Boycott
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Johnnie Carr, an early civil rights activist who joined a childhood friend, Rosa Parks, in the historic Montgomery bus boycott and stayed involved in the movement up to her final days, died here on Friday. She was 97.

Her death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for Baptist Medical Center South, where she had been hospitalized after a stroke on Feb. 11.

Mrs. Carr succeeded the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1967, a post she held at her death. It was that group that led the boycott of city buses in 1955 after Mrs. Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to whites on a crowded bus.

A year later, the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation on public transportation.

Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, praised Mrs. Carr’s commitment to the civil rights cause. “I think ultimately, when the final history books are written,” Mr. Dees said, “she’ll be one of the few people remembered for that terrific movement.”

As the civic group’s president, Mrs. Carr helped lead several initiatives to improve race relations and conditions for blacks. She was involved in a lawsuit to desegregate Montgomery schools, with her son, Arlam Jr., then 13, the named plaintiff.

In addition to her son, Arlam, Mrs. Carr is survived by two daughters, Annie Bell Beasley and Alma Lee Smith, The Montgomery Advertiser reported.

Mrs. Carr played a prominent role in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of Mrs. Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat, speaking to thousands of schoolchildren who marched to the Alabama Capitol.

“Look back, but march forward,” Mrs. Carr urged the huge crowd of young people.

She also traveled to memorial services in Washington, where her eulogy for Mrs. Parks was “really the most dynamic” moment, recalled Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Just days before her stroke, Mrs. Carr participated in King Day ceremonies in Montgomery, speaking after a parade. Admirers marveled at her energy and commitment into her 90s.

In recent decades, civil rights landmarks, including the site where Mrs. Parks, who died in 2005, was arrested, have become historic points of interest for tourists.

“When we first started, we weren’t thinking about history,” Mrs. Carr told The Associated Press in an interview in 2003. “We were thinking about the conditions and the discrimination.”

Posted by lois at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2008

poeta revolutionario raúlrsalinas.

Saludos desde Resistencia Bookstore, Casa de Red Salmon Arts,

It is with great sadness we inform all of our community supporters, comrades, familia and colegas about the passing of our elder, teacher, father, chicanindio, and poeta revolutionario raúlrsalinas.

As you may know, for the past couple of years, raúl has been struggling with his health. We understand that it's difficult for us to let him go, but since the beginning of the year his health continued to be a major challenge. Unfortunately, his body just could not take the strain and was deteriorating at a rapid pace. Even though he has left this realm and it's a great loss para nuestro pueblo, his spirit is strong and lives on in all of us.

As his family provides more information, we will share it with everyone. For now this is just a notification of the passing of our brother. We will notify you about where you can send condolences, flowers, and cards as we get more information. An altar has been created in front of the bookstore on South First St. in Austin, Texas for now. We thank everyone for their good energy and support and prayers in this time of loss and mourning.

CON RESPECTO Y EN LUCHA,
Rene Valdez
February 13, 2008

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January 17, 2008

Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Fascist Fighter

January 17, 2008
Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Franco Leader
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Milton Wolff, the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the longtime commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died Monday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Peter N. Carroll, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

At first a young Communist rabble-rouser on soapboxes in New York City, Mr. Wolff was wielding a machine gun in Spain by the time he was 21. By 22, he was the ninth commander of what is commonly called the Lincoln Brigade; four of his predecessors had been killed, four wounded; none now survive, the archives confirm.

Mr. Wolff found himself holding together the remnants of North American volunteers on a counteroffensive that moved across the Ebro River to the violent Hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols. It was a last gasp by foreign troops supporting the elected leftist government of Spain against the revolt led by Gen. Francisco Franco. The Americans soon left Spain; Madrid fell in March 1939, and the war was over.

While Mr. Wolff was in Spain, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who served him his first glass of Scotch; Hemingway was in Spain as a reporter and wrote fiction about the conflict as well. Later, in a pamphlet issued when sculptures of the fighters were unveiled, he called Mr. Wolff “as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg.”

After the exhausted volunteers arrived in New York aboard the ocean liner Paris on Dec. 15, 1938, it was Mr. Wolff who laid a wreath outside the railing of Madison Square Park, kept out of the park for want of a permit.

Mr. Wolff never stopped defying authority. He helped lead the fight against United States support of Franco’s government and battled fiercely for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He even offered the services of the aging veterans of the Lincoln Brigade to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who declined them.

Mr. Wolff was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn on Oct. 7, 1915. He dropped out of high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program for unemployed youths. He was dropped when he protested what he considered the poor treatment of an injured friend, Mr. Carroll said.

He found a job in the garment district and joined the Young Communist League. When a leader called for volunteers to go to Spain, Mr. Wolff raised his hand. He considered himself a pacifist and planned to serve as a medic, but switched to a machine-gun company when his Washington battalion went into action at Brunete in July 1937.

The American volunteers were not actually members of a Lincoln Brigade, though that famous term was commonly used, even among veterans. Some, like Mr. Wolff, joined the Washington Battalion, others, the Lincoln Battalion. These battalions, and two others from other countries, made up the 15th International Brigade.

After the Washington Battalion suffered crushing casualties, it was merged into the Lincoln Battalion. More than 900 of the 3,000 American volunteers in these battalions were killed. It is believed that fewer than 40 are still living.

Mr. Wolff was fighting on the Aragon front in March 1938 and became commander when an artillery hit destroyed the battalion headquarters and killed several ranking officers. Then a captain, he led soldiers through perilous retreats and wandered behind enemy lines until they managed to swim across the Ebro.

One day, Robert Capa, the legendary photographer, snapped Mr. Wolff standing next to Hemingway. The photo appeared on the cover of The Forward, and for the first time his mother knew her son was in combat. He had told her he was working in a factory to free a Spanish loyalist for hazardous duty.

Mr. Wolff always said he first met Hemingway after stealing his mistress, something he told Salon in 1999 that Hemingway did not mind. Hemingway minded more when he found out that Mr. Wolff had no idea who he was. For his part, Mr. Wolff resented Hemingway’s description of villagers loyal to the Republic as having murdered fascists in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Mr. Wolff is survived by his daughter, Susan Wallis of Vermont; his son, Peter, of Connecticut; four grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Mr. Wolff said he was turned down for combat duty in World War II because of concerns about his leftist politics. He later fought successfully against the “subversive” label pinned on the Lincoln veterans for decades. He personally delivered 20 ambulances to the Nicaraguan government when the Reagan administration was supporting rebels against it.

One of his battles after the civil war was leading his veterans to urge the Brooklyn Dodgers to integrate. “The guys were all Dodgers fans,” he said. “It was a way to carry on the struggle.”

Posted by lois at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2008

Kinkri Devi: Fought Illegal Mining in India

January 6, 2008
Kinkri Devi Is Dead at 82; Fought Illegal Mining in India
By HARESH PANDYA

Kinkri Devi, an illiterate and impoverished woman who had waged a long and at least partly successful fight against illegal mining and quarrying in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, died last Sunday in Chandigarh, India. She was 82.

The cause was age-related ailments, family sources said.

Ms. Devi was born into a poor Dalit, or untouchable, family in the village of Ghaton in 1925. Her father was a subsistence farmer. That she came from a low caste made her struggle against powerful and politically connected mining interests all the more remarkable.

With no hope of an education, she began working as a servant in early childhood and, at 14, married Shamu Ram, a bonded laborer. He died of typhoid when she was just 22, and she was forced to become a sweeper.

Over the years, she watched the world around her change for the worse. Uncontrolled quarrying despoiled the fabled hills in many parts of Himachal Pradesh, harming the water supply and destroying once-rich paddy fields. Seeing the damage in her own district, she vowed to take on the mining interests.

Backed by People’s Action for People in Need, a local volunteer group, Ms. Devi filed a public interest lawsuit in the High Court of Shimla, the state capital, against 48 mine owners, accusing them of reckless limestone quarrying. The quarry owners dismissed her campaign, saying she was only trying to blackmail them.

After a long period with no response to her suit, she headed for Shimla and staged a 19-day hunger strike outside the court until it agreed to take up the issue. The strike won Ms. Devi national and international headlines. In 1987, the High Court not only ordered a stay on mining but also imposed a blanket ban on blasting in the hills.

Faced with the prospect of closing their operations, her opponents threatened to kill her, but she continued to fight. The mine owners appealed to the Supreme Court of India, which ruled against them in July 1995, adding to Ms. Devi’s renown.

The same year, still working as a sweeper, she was invited to attend the International Women’s Conference in Beijing because of the keen interest taken in her by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the first lady.

A private organization sponsored her trip to China, where Mrs. Clinton asked her to light the lamp at the inaugural function. She spoke to thunderous applause about how the enchanting Himalayas were being degraded by illegal limestone quarrying and how it was up to ordinary people like her to save the environment.

Despite Ms. Devi’s efforts and the Supreme Court ruling, quarrying continues not only in the hills but also in the forest preserves, though with some improved regulation.

She is survived by a son and 12 grandchildren.

Ms. Devi, who could neither read nor write and learned to sign her name just a few years ago, also waged a long campaign for opening a degree-granting college in Sangrah, the village where she spent most of her life.

“It wasn’t in my destiny to study,” she said, “but I don’t want others to suffer the way I did for want of education.”

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December 16, 2007

Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91

December 14, 2007
Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Henrietta Yurchenco, whose quest to save living music from the past took her from the mountains of Guatemala and southern Mexico to a New York City radio station to the Jewish community of Morocco, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.

The cause was lung failure, her son, Peter, said.

Like a linguist nailing down a dying language, Ms. Yurchenco, an ethnomusicologist, recorded music from long ago that faced an unclear tomorrow. In an interview, Pete Seeger said she “went to places people didn’t believe she would be able to find.”

Among her thousands of recordings are ritual songs from North, South and Central American Indians, including peyote chants, and music celebrating everything from love to agriculture, found from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean to Appalachia to Spain.

Oscar Brand, the folk singer and radio personality, citing her work with Native Americans, said, “She went out of her way to discover the soft spots, the shining things you couldn’t see in the mists back in the mountains.”

Ms. Yurchenco was also a radio producer, announcer and interviewer. Beginning in the 30s, she broadcast only folk music, both traditional and modern, at a time when few knew it.

Woody Guthrie called her in 1939 or 1940 and asked if he could be on her live show. Bob Dylan, a little tongue-tied, did one of his early radio interviews with her in 1962. In an interview with NPR in 1999, she said she scoured union halls and immigrant groups to find genuine music.

Ethnomusicologists study music in varying ethnic contexts. Ms. Yurchenco began by tracking down 14 all-but-unknown Mexican and Guatemalan tribes, reaching them with little but a mule and 300 pounds of recording equipment. She eventually recorded 2,000 of their songs for the Library of Congress.

Later, she studied the music of the Sephardim, Jews who had been thrown out of Spain in the 15th century. She arrived in Morocco just as many Sephardim were preparing to move to the new state of Israel, and she seized a last chance to capture their ancient songs in the original context.

Ms. Yurchenco was intrigued by women’s roles in creating music and of the sexual politics involved in making it. Mr. Seeger said women may be the best music collectors, partly because many have the patience to appreciate a grandmother singing a 400-year-old ballad to a baby.

Ms. Yurchenco wrote several books, including a biography of Woody Guthrie. At least one book is still to be published: a study of the music of Morocco’s Sephardic women. She long taught at City College, lectured widely and fought fiercely for her leftist ideals.

Starting in 2005 and continuing almost until her death, Ms. Yurchenco invited like-minded friends to her apartment to sing songs against the Iraq war, often the same ones used against the Vietnam War. Some of their singing was broadcast on Internet radio.

Henrietta Weiss was born in New Haven on March 22, 1916. She told The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper in Manhattan, that her father was “a dreamer who started out in business and failed miserably.” She was a promising pianist who attended the Yale School of Music.

At Yale, she met Boris Yurchenco, an Argentine-born painter, at a meeting of the John Reed Club, named for the American writer who chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution. They were married in 1936, the year she was first arrested in a protest; she was demonstrating against a brass band from Mussolini’s Italy.

In 1939, her musical interests led her to WNYC, the public radio station then owned by New York City. She made friends with people like Burl Ives, the folk singer and Alan Lomax, a legendary music collector.

In 1941, she followed her husband on a trip to Mexico. An engineer from WNYC came along to record music, and she took over when he left. With financial support from groups like the American Philosophical Society, she repeatedly visited the area to record animal sacrifices, healing ceremonies and much else. Scorpions, both yellow and green, were a persistent problem.

Ms. Yurchenco and her husband divorced in 1955. In addition to her son, Peter, of Skillman, N.J., she is survived by two grandchildren.

Legend has it that Mr. Seeger and the Almanac Singers, an earlier name for the Weavers, wrote the song “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” in Ms. Yurchenco’s relatively quiet bathroom during a noisy party in her apartment. Mr. Seeger said that was not quite true, though he recalled her famous parties.

Mr. Seeger explained that Leadbelly, the great folk and blues artist, was in Ms. Yurchenco’s bathroom with the singer Sam Kennedy, who perched on the obvious as he sang “Drimmin Down,” a lament about a dead cow. (Leadbelly later livened up the beat and used the tune for his own cow song, “If It Wasn’t for Dicky.”)

Mr. Seeger liked the melody and added lyrics about wine.

February 11, 2007
Urban Studies | Singing Out
Yearning to Study War No More
By DAVID AUSTIN GURA

IF you had been standing outside apartment 12E in the white brick apartment building at West 22nd Street and Ninth Avenue in Chelsea on Thursday evening, you would have heard songs taking you back four decades, to a time when it almost seemed that by singing loudly enough, it might be possible to stop a war.

It is on Thursday evenings that Henrietta Yurchenco, a 90-year-old former City College professor and radio producer, collects a few of her students to sing the same protest songs she sang and taught 40 years ago. The war on their minds is a new one, but many of the songs they sing, like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Study War No More,” were the product of wars long past.

Ms. Yurchenco, who this evening was wearing a jewel-studded peace symbol around her neck, still believes in the beauty and power of folk music. And her former students, now in their 40s and 50s, find that same beauty and power in their teacher.

Ms. Yurchenco taught ethnomusicology at City College in the 1960s and ’70s, when another war divided the nation. She held singalongs then, and in 2005, she revived the tradition with friends and former students.

Her charges group themselves around the kitchen table, surrounded by trailing ivy and colorful animal sculptures from Mexico and Guatemala, two countries where she has traveled and recorded traditional music. Ms. Yurchenco runs the singalong like a seminar: distributing lyric sheets, commenting on the repertoire, fielding questions. Every evening has a theme. This evening, the theme was labor, and the lineup included such songs as “Dark as a Dungeon,” Merle Travis’s song about the perils of coal mining, and “The Banks Are Made of Marble,” popularized by Pete Seeger.

When Ms. Yurchenco taught courses on folk music and the blues, students flocked to her home for singalongs. She barely had enough space for everyone. These days, perhaps half a dozen singers show up, although other musicians drop in. Among the regulars is Bob Malenky, a self-described “red-diaper baby” raised on such labor movement staples as “Joe Hill” and “Union Maid.”

At this singalong, after a rendition of “Join the C.I.O.,” Ms. Yurchenco described a fight she had with the song’s author, Aunt Molly Jackson, a cantankerous, Kentucky-born labor activist and folksinger. The fight took place during a picnic in the 1940s at Bear Mountain State Park, attended by musical luminaries like Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Mr. Seeger. “She was a peppery dame,” Ms. Yurchenco said of Ms. Jackson. “You had to watch out for her.”

Although Ms. Yurchenco’s folk repertoire is vast, she prefers songs that couple easy tunes with provocative lyrics. “We don’t do any mediocre songs,” she said. “The melodies are good; the words are wonderful.” DAVID AUSTIN GURA

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December 10, 2007

Bob Kohler, a veteran gay rights activist

December 10, 2007
On West Village Streets, Tears for a Gay Activist
By TRYMAINE LEE

Friends and colleagues of Bob Kohler, a veteran gay rights activist who died at 81 on Wednesday, took to the streets of the West Village last evening, celebrating the life of the man they called a hero, a griot and a legend of the gay community.

With candles and signs held high, and with pill bottles and ceramic pots filled with some of Mr. Kohler’s cremated remains, dozens of his friends and admirers marched through the streets, chanting to the beat of a drummer, stories of Mr. Kohler’s courage in more than six decades of activism spilling from their lips.

Some cried as they stepped down West 13th Street, Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to Sheridan Square, ending up at the Hudson River piers, a refuge for many gay youths in the area.

“Till the very end he struggled for us, all of us,” said Jennifer Flynn, 36, a friend and member of a group of mostly lesbian activists who helped to care for Mr. Kohler as he battled cancer in his final days. “He could have lived a comfortable life somewhere. He could have ignored everyone.”

Mr. Kohler was on the front lines of the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, the brawl between gay men and police officers at a bar in the Village that is widely viewed as the start of the American gay rights movement.

He also fought in the Navy in World War II and was a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, among other gay rights groups. Friends said Mr. Kohler emerged from the Stonewall uprising a leader in a newly galvanized gay community and soon adopted a militant brand of activism.

“He always had a liberation impulse,” said Bill Dobbs, a friend for 15 years. “And he remained militant when most people were pushing buttons on remote controls, doing nothing.”

Mr. Kohler also fought for the rights of women and minorities, friends said, and had a following of young gay African-Americans and Latinos who looked up to him for his history of taking on causes beyond traditional gay issues.

“He was the epitome of an ally,” said Bran Fenner, 25, who as a high school student was a founder of Fierce, a group for gay youths of color. “He was able to tell us a history that had been denied to us.”

Well into his 70s, Mr. Kohler continued to be an organizer and activist. In 1999 he was one of the demonstrators seized in a mass arrest outside 1 Police Plaza after the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant shot by the police 41 times.

“I do not equate my oppression with the oppression of blacks and Latinos,” Mr. Kohler told The Village Voice after his arrest. “You can’t. It is not the same struggle, but it is one struggle. And, if my being here as a longtime gay activist can influence other people in the gay community, it’s worth getting arrested.”

Sharlene Cooper, executive director of the New York City AIDS Housing Network, said Mr. Kohler helped her kick a nasty drug habit, cope with a diagnosis of AIDS and get her life back on track.

“As soon as you met Bob you loved him,” she said. “You wish you had 10 Bobs in your life.”

As the group marched down Christopher Street, stopping for a moment in front of the building that once housed the Loft, a clothing boutique Mr. Kohler owned, shopkeepers peered from their windows, and passers-by paused to watch the goings on.

“Whose street?” The crowd chanted. “Bob’s street.”

The group, escorted by a police van, stepped into a park by the piers. The sun had since set and the glow of half-melted candles dotted the circle that had formed around Ms. Cooper, who had called for a moment of silence.

After the bowed heads of many mourners lifted, Phillip Spinelli, a friend of Mr. Kohler’s for more than 40 years, did his best to wipe away the tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I have something to say,” Mr. Spinelli said, raising a pill bottle with some of Mr. Kohler’s remains in it. “He fought for our rights, our life,” he said. “God, help us.”

Then, tossing Mr. Kohler’s remains into the river, he yelled through his tears, “Have a nice swim, honey.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/nyregion/10kohler.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2007

Clara Fox, Tireless Advocate for Subsidized Housing, Is Dead at 90

November 16, 2007
Clara Fox, Tireless Advocate for Subsidized Housing, Is Dead at 90
By DENNIS HEVESI

Clara Fox, an advocate of subsidized housing for poor and moderate-income people and the founder of the Settlement Housing Fund, a nonprofit organization that now houses 2,200 families in 44 buildings in New York City, died on Nov. 9 in Manhattan.

She was 90 and lived in Manhattan Plaza, the twin-towered complex on West 42nd Street that she helped save from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s.

The cause was kidney failure, said Carol Lamberg, the current director of the Settlement Housing Fund, who succeeded Mrs. Fox in January 1983.

Mrs. Fox formed the Settlement Housing Fund in 1969 by bringing together housing experts from 35 settlement houses, the neighborhood agencies created in the first decades of the 20th century to aid newly arriving immigrants. And though she retired from the organization as its founding executive director, she never stopped advocating for affordable housing.

Until her death, she remained co-chairwoman of the New York Housing Conference, a coalition of more than 70 organizations representing developers, bankers, architects, housing advocates and owners of nonprofit buildings. Among other activities, the group, an affiliate of the National Housing Conference, lobbies the government on housing policy.

“Clara originated the idea of combining low- and moderate-income housing with social programs,” said Conrad Egan, the president of the national conference. When rental buildings were converted to cooperatives in the 1960s under a New York State subsidy program, Mr. Egan said, Mrs. Fox was the first to train former renters in how to manage co-ops.

Ms. Lamberg said: “Clara was one of the first people who advocated for low-income cooperatives. She was also one of the first to bring together social agencies and housing groups to work for better housing. Now there are all kinds of nonprofit groups that create and sustain affordable housing. She had a lasting effect.”

Clara Leon was born in the Bronx on May 10, 1917, a daughter of Ralph and Lillian Frankel Leon. She graduated from the University of Chicago, then earned a master’s degree in sociology there. Her marriage to William Fox ended in divorce in 1950. She is survived by her daughter, Roberta Fox, of Manhattan, and a sister, Florence Blank, of the Bronx.

In the early 1960s, Mrs. Fox, who had been the director of a private nursery school, became New York City’s first coordinator of Head Start, the federally sponsored program that provided eight weeks of education and social enrichment for prekindergarten children from poor families. After leaving Head Start in 1965, Mrs. Fox was asked to become housing coordinator for United Neighborhood Houses, the organization of 35 settlement houses that four years later established the Settlement Housing Fund.

“Clara was very proud of putting together the plan that saved Manhattan Plaza,” Ms. Lamberg said.

Built by a major developer in the mid-1970s, Manhattan Plaza, a complex of 1,688 apartments in two towers between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, was supposed to house middle-income renters. By the time the buildings were completed, Times Square was squalid and inflation was in the double digits. With few renters, Manhattan Plaza faced default.

The city wanted to turn it into a low-income project, a plan opposed by Broadway theater owners. Mrs. Fox led a committee that came up with an alternative: Manhattan Plaza would house performing artists, theater workers and community residents receiving federal rent subsidies. Those who could afford it — later to include Mrs. Fox — would pay market-rate rents.

In 1983, because of her work on the plan, Mrs. Fox was named an honorary member of Actors’ Equity, the professional actors’ and stage managers’ union.

On her retirement from the Settlement Housing Fund, Mrs. Fox told The New York Times: “The thing I feel strongest about is the incredible indifference that seems to exist in government about what’s happening to subsidized housing. We have done worse than any other social program, and what we hear from Congressional representatives is there is no constituency in Washington for low-income housing.”

Posted by lois at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2007

Johtje Vos, Who Saved Wartime Jews, Dies at 97

November 4, 2007
Johtje Vos, Who Saved Wartime Jews, Dies at 97
By DENNIS HEVESI
NY Times

Johtje Vos, a Dutch woman who with her husband hid three dozen Jews in their home during World War II, shepherding them through a tunnel under the backyard and into the woods whenever the Gestapo pounded on the door, died on Oct. 10 in Saugerties, N.Y. She was 97, and had lived in Woodstock from 1951 until a year ago.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Barbara Moorman.

During the war years, Mrs. Vos and her husband, Aart, lived in a three-bedroom house on a dead-end road in the town of Laren in the Netherlands, with acres of forest behind it. Mr. Vos, who died in 1990, grew up in Laren and knew every stream and field in the area. That allowed him to lead Jews through the woods to the house at night and back into the woods when the Nazis were coming. Each time a German raid was imminent, a sympathetic Dutch police chief in Laren, a friend of the Voses, would dial their phone, let it ring twice, hang up, then repeat the code.

In all, 36 people were saved by the Voses, with as many as 14 hiding in their home at any one time after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940.

Evelyn Loeb Garfinkel and her mother, Ilse Loeb, were among the three dozen.

“If Johtje hadn’t done what she did, my mother wouldn’t have survived and I wouldn’t be alive,” Mrs. Garfinkel, of Delmar, N.Y., told The Times Union of Albany after attending Mrs. Vos’s funeral on Oct. 16.

Mr. and Mrs. Vos resisted the notion that they had done something out of the ordinary. Interviewed for the 1992 book “Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust,” by Gay Block and Malka Drucker (Holmes & Meier), Mrs. Vos said, “I want to say right away that the words ‘hero’ and ‘righteous gentile’ are terribly misplaced.”

“I don’t feel righteous,” said Mrs. Vos, who, like her husband, was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, “and we are certainly not heroes, because we didn’t sit at the table when the misery started and say, ‘O.K., now we are going to risk our lives to save some people.’ ”

It started one night in 1942 when a Jewish couple asked to be sheltered for just that night as they ran from the Germans. Soon after, another friend asked them to keep a suitcase containing valuables before he was sent to a ghetto.

The Voses were surprised to discover that their friend was Jewish. “We never talked about Jews,” Mrs. Vos recalled. “They were all just Dutch, that’s all.”

A 3-year-old boy, Mark de Klijn, was later taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Vos as his parents faced deportation. Word filtered through the Jewish community, and other escapees began seeking shelter. Soon, mattresses covered the floor. Unless they were trying to flee even farther, the guests would never leave the house.

Except when the phone rang twice, then twice again. Then Mr. Vos would lead them into a shed attached to the back of the house, down through a camouflaged trapdoor under a coal bin and into a 150-foot tunnel through which they would crawl before slipping into the woods.

Every time the Gestapo came, Mrs. Vos said, “I would take questions from them and lie and lie and lie.”

Johanna (she preferred the nickname Johtje, pronounced YO-tya) Kuyper was born on Dec. 29, 1909, in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, the second of three daughters of Guillaume and Henrietta Storm van Leeuwen Kuyper. Her father, a retired army officer, was the mayor of Amersfoort. Her grandfather Abraham Kuyper had been prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905.

As a young woman, Johanna Kuyper went to Paris to work as a freelance journalist, “which was a scandalous thing at the time,” she said. There, she married a young German artist, Heinrich Molenaar, who hated Hitler, she said. The couple left France and moved into the family-owned house in Laren, where their two children were born: Mrs. Moorman, of Glenford, N.Y., and Hetty Crews, who died in 2001. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 1942, Johanna Kuyper and Aart Vos were married. They had four sons, three of whom survive: Dominique, of Woodstock; John, of Saugerties; and Sebastian, of the Netherlands. Their son Peter died in 1973. Mrs. Vos is also survived by 15 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

As far as Mrs. Vos’s children are concerned, they have another sibling: Moana Hilfman Brinkman, of Amsterdam.

When Mr. and Mrs. Vos were living in the house in Laren, they regularly beseeched Moana Hilfman’s parents to take refuge with them. The Hilfmans refused.

“They said: ‘We are Jews. This is our fate,’ ” Mrs. Vos once recalled. “I begged them to at least let me take their 3-year-old daughter, Moana.”

Only on the night that the Gestapo came did the Hilfmans hand over their daughter to a friend, who spirited her to the Vos home.

“She lived with us for years after the war,” Mrs. Moorman said on Friday. “We consider her our sister.”

Posted by lois at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

Vernon Bellecourt, Who Protested the Use of Indian Mascots, for example the Cleveland Indians (!) Dies at 75

October 17, 2007
Vernon Bellecourt, Who Protested the Use of Indian Mascots, Dies at 75
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Vernon Bellecourt, an Ojibwa Indian who waged a long campaign for native rights, most visible in battling the use of Indian nicknames by sports teams, died Oct. 13 in Minneapolis. He was 75.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his sister-in-law, Peggy Bellecourt, said.

Mr. Bellecourt (pronounced BELL-kort) first gained notice in 1972 as a principal spokesman for the American Indian Movement when the group organized a cross-country caravan to Washington, where members occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He later worked to gain international recognition for Indian nations and their treaties, partly by meeting with controversial foreign figures like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader who died in 2004.

But it was as president of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media that Mr. Bellecourt achieved his greatest visibility. When teams with names like the Indians, the Redskins or the Chiefs appeared in high-profile contests, he was often there to protest.

He was arrested twice for burning an effigy of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot, Chief Wahoo, and protested the Washington Redskins at the Super Bowl.

Mr. Bellecourt said Indian nicknames for sports teams perpetuated stereotypes, making it easier to forget the real identities, problems and demands of Native Americans.

The argument gained traction. In 2001, the United States Commission on Civil Rights criticized the use of Indian images and nicknames by non-Indian schools, calling them “insensitive in light of the long history of forced assimilation that American Indian people have endured in this country.”

With many other forces in play, how much Mr. Bellecourt’s campaign has influenced colleges and universities to abandon Indian mascots is hard to gauge. But in recent years, more than a half dozen have done so, including the University of Illinois this year. In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association barred Indian mascots during postseason tournaments. A few newspapers have quit using Indian-related nicknames.

Professional sports teams have been more resistant, although Mr. Bellecourt applauded in 1996 when Syracuse’s Class AAA baseball team became the Skychiefs after 62 years of being the Chiefs. What Bellecourt called his “big four” targets — the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves — have not budged.

Bellecourt was born WaBun-Inini, meaning Man of Dawn in Ojibwa, on Oct. 17, 1931, on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota. His father was disabled by mustard gas in World War I, and his mother raised 12 children on government benefits in a home with no running water or electricity.

Mr. Bellecourt dropped out of parochial school after the eighth grade and worked at odd jobs. He was convicted of robbing a bar in St. Paul and sent to prison at 19. (The state expunged the conviction from his record in 1979, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported.)

In prison, he learned how to be a barber, then went to beauty school after his release. He soon owned two beauty parlors in the Minneapolis area and thought he was on his way to being a millionaire, he told The Star Tribune in 1999. He moved to Denver and sold real estate.

A sense that he was losing his heritage combined with an admiration for his brother Clyde, a founder of A.I.M. in the late 1960s, led Mr. Bellecourt to help start an A.I.M chapter in Denver. He was soon involved as a spokesman and negotiator in the 1972 Washington demonstration, known as the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan. The next year, he played a small part in the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

In 1974, Bellecourt helped organize an international conference of native peoples under United Nations auspices to proclaim their rights. After Leonard Peltier was convicted for killing two F.B.I. agents during a shootout at Pine Ridge in 1975, Mr. Bellecourt became a leader in the campaign to free him.

Mr. Bellecourt’s first trip to see a foreign leader was in 1989 when he met with Col. Qaddafi, whom he described as a “very warm, sensitive human being,” and later visited at least a half dozen more times. In August 2007, he traveled to Venezuela to meet with President Hugo Chávez about getting free or cheap heating oil for Indian reservations.

Mr. Bellecourt is survived by his wife, Carol Ann Bellecourt, from whom he was separated; his companion, Janice Denny; six children; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Bellecourt never stopped repeating that Indians were people, not mascots. At a playoff game in 1993 between the Minnesota Vikings and the Redskins, he declared, “We don’t like your chicken feathers, your paint, your cheap Hollywood chants.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/sports/17bellecourt.html?ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2007

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

New York Times
August 23, 2007
Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988. .
Her husband, Robert Nichols, told the Associated Press that she had battled breast cancer. The agency did not say whether her death was directly connected to that illness.

Ms. Paley's output was modest, just 45 stories in three volumes: "The Little Disturbances of Man" (Doubleday, 1959); "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and "Later the Same Day" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed to be surgically spare and unimaginably rich at the same time.
Her "Collected Stories," published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York's first official state author.
Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women - mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers - in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud's men had loved and left behind.
To read Ms. Paley's fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, its hairpin rhetorical reversals and its capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg be read aloud.
Some critics found Ms. Paley's stories short on plot, and in fact much of what happens is that nothing much happens. Affairs begin, babies are born, affairs end. Mothers gather in the park. But that was exactly the point. In Ms. Paley's best stories, the language is so immediate, the characters so authentic, that they are propelled by an inherent urgency - the kind that makes readers ask, "And then what happened?"
Open Ms. Paley's first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man," to the first story, "Goodbye and Good Luck":
"I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised - change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years. Who's listening? Papa's in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. So she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinks - poor Rosie.
"Poor Rosie! If there was more life in my little sister, she would know my heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that her whole married life is a kindergarten."
Hooked.
For Ms. Paley's immigrant Jews, the push and pull of assimilation is everywhere. Parents live in the East Bronx or Coney Island; their grown children flee to Greenwich Village. A family agonizes over its lively daughter's starring role in her school's Christmas pageant.
Later stories were even darker. Women are raped; children died of drug overdoses. Threading through the books are familiar characters, in particular Faith Darwin, the subject of many of Ms. Paley's finest stories, grown older and world-wearier.
Though Ms. Paley's work also rings with Irish and Italian and black voices, it was for the language of her childhood, a heady blend of Yiddish, Russian and English, that she was best known. Reviewers sometimes called her prose postmodern, but all of it - even the death-defying, almost surreal turns of logic that were a stylistic hallmark - was already present in Yiddish oral tradition. For instance:
A man meets a friend on the street.
"So, how's by you?" the friend asks.
"Ach," the man replies. "My wife left me; the children don't call; business is bad. With life so terrible, better not to have been born."
"Yes," his friend says. "But how many are so lucky? Not one in ten thousand."
Grace Goodside was born in the Bronx on Dec. 11, 1922. (The family changed its name from Gutseit on coming to the United States.) Her parents, Isaac and the former Manya Ridnyik, were Ukrainian Jewish Socialists who had been exiled by Czar Nicholas II - Isaac to Siberia, Manya to Germany. In 1906, they were able to leave for New York, where Isaac became a doctor. They had a son and a daughter, and, approaching middle age, a third child, Grace.
Her childhood was noisy and warm. There were stories and singing and good strong tea. Always, there was argument. The Communists hollered at the Socialists, the Socialists hollered at the Zionists, and everybody hollered at the anarchists.
Ms. Paley studied for a year at Hunter College before marrying Jess Paley, a film cameraman, at 19; the marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Hoping to be a poet (she studied briefly with Auden at the New School), she wrote only verse until she was in her 30's. But little by little, the narrative speech of the old neighborhood - here, that of young Shirley Abramowitz in "The Loudest Voice" - began to assert itself:
"There is a certain place where dumb-waiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother's mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest.
"There, my own mother is still as full of breathing as me and the grocer stands up to speak to her. 'Mrs. Abramowitz,' he says, 'people should not be afraid of their children.'
" 'Ah, Mr. Bialik,' my mother replies, 'if you say to her or her father "Ssh," they say, "In the grave it will be quiet." ' "
A self-described "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist," Ms. Paley was a lifelong advocate of liberal social causes. During Vietnam, she was jailed several times for antiwar protests; in later years, she lobbied for women's rights, against nuclear proliferation and, most recently, against the war in Iraq. For decades, she was a familiar presence on lower Sixth Avenue, near her Greenwich Village home, smiling broadly, gum cracking, leaflets in hand.
Ms. Paley, who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence and the City College of New York, was also a past vice president of the PEN American Center.
Some critics have called Ms. Paley's work uneven, but what they really seemed to mean is that it was too even: similar people in similar situations in similar places. But the stories that worked - and many did - were so blindingly satisfying that the lesser ones scarcely mattered. In her best work, Ms. Paley collapsed entire worlds into a few perfect paragraphs, as in the opening of "Wants," from "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute":
"I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
"Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
"He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
"I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
"The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
"My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
"That's possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began."

Her other books include a collection of essays, "Just As I Thought" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), and three volumes of poetry, "Leaning Forward" (Granite Press, 1985); "New and Collected Poems" (Tilbury Press, 1991); and "Long Walks and Intimate Talks" (Feminist Press, 1991). A film, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," based on three stories in the collection and adapted by John Sayles and Susan Rice, was released in 1983.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1978, Ms. Paley put her finger on the grass-roots sensibility that informed her work.
"I'm not writing a history of famous people," she explained. "I am interested in a history of everyday life."

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


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Posted by lois at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2007

Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade

August 12, 2007
Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Peter Carroll, chief of the board of governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Mr. Carroll said that about 40 of about 3,000 American veterans of the Spanish Civil War volunteers are living. It had been the job of Mr. Fishman, as executive secretary-treasurer of the veterans, to announce deaths.

At times he was almost alone in keeping the group going, Mr. Carroll said, particularly during the long, ultimately successful legal battle to remove the group’s subversive label. Mr. Fishman put out a newsletter, kept scrupulous books, ran the office daily and spoke widely.

In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1962, he said: “I’m the organization. If there’s something to decide, I talk it over with the guys and then decide what I’m going to do. Cockeyed, but that’s the way it is.”

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after Gen. Francisco Franco set out to overthrow the newly elected leftist government. Americans soon volunteered to fight Franco in what came to be called the Lincoln Brigade.

It was actually a battalion. Officially, Americans joined it or the Washington Battalion. The two American battalions, which informally have come to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, joined with four other battalions of volunteers from other countries to form the XV International Brigade.

In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a high-school dropout working in a laundry and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.

He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the lock on the door and put the family back in.

Many believe that at least half of the volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade were Communists, but Mr. Fishman’s reasons for joining were more complex, he told The Times in 1969.

“Why did I go?” he said. “That’s hard to say. That’s a key question. I was active in trade union work. I wanted to travel. I belonged to the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., and we were very anti-Fascist, much opposed to Hitler, Franco.”

He was born Moses Fishman on Sept. 28, 1915, and grew up in Astoria. On the day he was to depart for Spain, he left for work at the usual time to deceive his parents. Halfway down the stairs, he realized he had forgotten his toothbrush, returned for it and broke it in half so it would fit in his pocket. (It was the only thing he brought back from Spain, he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.)Mr. Fishman called his parents when he got off the subway near the dock, and they cried when he told them his plans. His mother had never seen his father cry. He himself was unafraid. “When you’re 21, there’s no bullet meant for you,” he told The Times in 2000.

On July 5, 1937, during the Brunete offensive west of Madrid, a sniper hit Mr. Fishman’s thigh, leaving 32 pieces of bone and metal. He spent a year in Spanish hospitals, and a pin was put into his leg. At one point the leg became infected, he told The Courant. He was then in and out of hospitals in the United States for two years.

During World War II, Mr. Fishman was in the merchant marine. Afterward, he and other Lincoln veterans became involved in aiding refugees from Franco’s Spain. President Harry S. Truman’s attorney general labeled the veterans group subversive. In 1950, when such organizations had to register with the government, the entire executive committee of the Lincoln Brigade veterans resigned. Mr. Fishman stepped in to become secretary-treasurer.

After a federal court removed the subversive label in the 1970s, Mr. Fishman wrote a colleague that the change might not be good. He wryly suggested doing something subversive so as not to appear irrelevant to rebellious youth. (Mr. Fishman later dropped his party membership, Mr. Carroll said.)

Mr. Fishman is survived by his partner, Georgia Wever, of Manhattan, and his sisters Lilly Litsky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Pearl Fishman, of Yonkers.

He never tired of a lively demonstration. But he came to prefer sitting in a folding chair, as he did in 2004, when he hailed protesters at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. When they saw his Lincoln Brigade banner, they applauded back. In an interview with The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper, he said, “They come up — these young girls — they want you to take a picture with them and they kiss you.”

Other late-life adjustments were harder. In 2001, an article in The Economist recounted how he stumbled over the word “globalization” at a protest against globalization. “It was so much easier to say when we called it imperialism,” he was reported to have said.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/nyregion/12fishman.html

Posted by lois at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies

August 13, 2007
Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of white supremacy while traveling through the Upper South in the summer of 1944 led to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated seating on interstate bus lines, died Friday in Hayes, Va. She was 90.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said her granddaughter Janine Bacquie.

Irene Morgan’s fight against segregation took place a decade before the modern civil rights movement changed America. Taken up by the N.A.A.C.P. and argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, later the court’s first black justice, it proved a forerunner to Rosa Parks’s storied refusal to yield her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala.

Mrs. Morgan, a worker in a plant that made World War II bombers and the mother of two small children, was returning to her home in Baltimore aboard a Greyhound bus in July 1944 after a visit to her mother in Gloucester County, Va.

When the bus grew crowded, the driver told her to give her seat to a white person. Mrs. Morgan refused, and when a sheriff’s deputy tried to take her off the bus in Saluda, Va., she resisted.

“He put his hand on me to arrest me, so I took my foot and kicked him,” she recalled in “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” a 1995 public television documentary. “He was blue and purple and turned all colors. I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so I couldn’t bite him. So all I could do was claw and tear his clothes.”

Mrs. Morgan was arrested and pleaded guilty the next October to resisting arrest, paying a $100 fine. But she refused to pay a $10 fine for violating a Virginia law requiring segregated seating in public transportation.

She appealed, and the N.A.A.C.P., seeking a test case over segregated interstate transport, represented her.

“She was young, attractive, articulate and, judging by her poised performance in Saluda, strong enough to withstand the pressures of a high-profile legal battle,” Raymond Arsenault wrote in his book “Freedom Riders.”

When Virginia’s highest court ruled against Mrs. Morgan, the N.A.A.C.P. appealed to the Supreme Court. Mr. Marshall and his fellow N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, William Hastie, argued that segregation aboard interstate buses — Mrs. Morgan’s bus was traveling from Virginia to Maryland — represented an unconstitutional burden on the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce and that it threatened free movement across state lines.

The N.A.A.C.P. brief in Morgan v. Virginia stated that “we are just emerging from a war in which all of the people of the United States were joined in a death struggle against the apostles of racism.”

On June 3, 1946, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 in favor of Mrs. Morgan. Justice Stanley F. Reed wrote that “seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.”

But the Southern states disregarded the ruling. In 1947, an interracial group led by Bayard Rustin, who helped organize the March on Washington two decades later, staged bus rides through the Upper South testing compliance.

Rustin and two other riders were arrested in North Carolina and served three weeks on a brutal prison farm. In 1961, Freedom Riders rode buses through the South to protest segregation and were met with violence in Alabama that stunned the nation.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, who was born and reared in Baltimore, lived on Long Island and ran a child-care center in Queens with her second husband, Stanley Kirkaldy. At age 68 she received a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and five years later she obtained a master’s degree in urban studies at Queens College.

She is survived by her daughter, Brenda Morgan Bacquie of Hayes, and her son, Sherwood Morgan Jr., of Dover, Del., from her marriage to Sherwood Morgan Sr., who died in 1948; her sisters Justine Walker, of Baltimore, and James Ethel Laforest, of Upper Marlboro, Md.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Stanley Kirkaldy died in November.

In 2000, Gloucester County, where Irene Morgan got on that bus six decades earlier, and where she lived in her final years, honored her on its 350th anniversary.

A year later, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. “When Irene Morgan boarded a bus for Baltimore in the summer of 1944,” the citation read, “she took the first step on a journey that would change America forever.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/us/13kirkaldy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2007

1986 Article by Harmon Wray: CCA/Private Prisons: "Cells for Sale"

This was posted on: http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/

Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 3, 1989
Cells for Sale
By Harmon L. Wray, Jr.

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 3-6

The rush to transfer government services and functions from public to profit-making hands has lately found its way to the "field" of incarceration and corrections. The current leader in this new growth industry is the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, chartered in January of 1983 and financed by Hospital Corporation of America founder Jack Massey of Massey Burch Investments, Inc., the South's largest venture capital company. According to CCA president and former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Tom Beasley, the Corrections Corporation of America alma to ~be to jails and prisons...what Hospital Corporation of America has become to medical facilities nationwide."

Declaring that "the market is limitless," Beasley (age 43) hopes to "solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time." CCA currently has seven contracts to own and/or manage detention centers, treatment facilities, jails and workhouses for federal and local jurisdictions in several Southern states--three in Tennessee, one in Florida, two in Texas (for illegal aliens), one in North Carolina. But this is small potatoes compared with what CCA intends to do: take over the entire prison system of particular states, and prepare for a bid on the federal system. "The private jail market is ripe," reports Barron's, the business weekly. "And it is brokers, architects, builders, and banks-not the taxpayers-who will make out like bandits.. In less than a year, CCA has more than doubled the size of its staff, now at 500.

The proposal CCA made to the State of Tennessee in the fall of 1985 was the boldest move yet in prisons-for-profit and showed why the company is considered the most aggressive and well-connected of the capitalist corrections firms. CCA initially proposed to buy out and operate the state's prison system, under federal court order since 1982, as well as build and manage two new prisons (later expanded to five new institutions). Thanks to effective lobbying by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the CCA bid was tabled last year by the Democratically-controlled state legislature. The action came during a special session called for the prison crisis by Republican governor Lamar Alexander, a CCA supporter who once rented a garage apartment to law student Tom Beasley. Alexander has spent seven years overseeing an unconstitutional prison system but has never set foot inside one of his state's prisons.

This year, the General Assembly, under the influence of nine full-time, high-powered CCA lobbyists paid an estimated $100,000, passed a more moderate privatization bill. Before the session Tom Beasley had

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said, "I intend to get a chunk of this system." Soon he will: the 180-bed Carter County work camp opens September 1, probably under CCA operation. But the legislation (which AFSCME plans to challenge in court) prohibits further privatization of Tennessee prisons for three years.

The ambitions of Beasley and other prison entrepreneurs are not limited to Tennessee. In fact, once CCA lost its bid for all Tennessee prisons, it pursued a smaller "chunk" primarily in order to avoid the embarrassment of having no home-state contracts to advertise in its sales pitch to other jurisdictions. Last December Beasley said that if the Reagan administration decided to sell the federal prison system (as the The Wall Street Journal had just reported it might), CCA would make an offer. CCA was one of three firms bidding for the multi-million dollar Moundsville, W.Va., prison, site of a New Year's Day prisoner rebellion. Reportedly, CCA has been working on proposals for state prison systems in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Misissippi, and Kentucky, as well as several western states. At this writing, CCA contracts to operate jails are pending in Sante Fe, N.M., and Key West, Fla. Meanwhile, CCA's Tennessee competitor, Corrections Associates Inc. (CAI), recently landed Tennessee and Alabama county jail contracts and a prison consulting contract with the Alexander administration. CAI's good fortune came on the heels of the resignation of its new president, Hubert McCullough, as Governor Alexander's finance commissioner.

The McCullough-Alexander connection is only one of many personal, business, and political linkages evident in the prisons-for-profit field. Like CAI's McCullough, CCA lobbyist Tom Ingram, 39, a former journalist and social worker, has been a prime mover with the anti-labor Tennessee Business Roundtable. Ingram also managed Alexander's two winning gubernatorial campaigns and served as his chief-of-staff for four years before forming his own public relations and business consulting firm. Others in the CCA-Alexander circle include CCA stockholders who are current and former Alexander cabinet officers, CCA administrators who are former state GOP chairpersons, a CCA lobbyist who was a Democratic state senator, and two prominent public figures who in 1985 sold their CCA stock to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest: Honey Alexander (the governor's wife held $5,000 of stock) and House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter ($33,000), the Democratic nominee to succeed Alexander. In this fall's general election, McWherter faces former Republican governor Winfield Dunn, a Memphis dentist who became a multi-millionaire as an executive for Hospital Corporation of America. Both Dunn and McWherter have called for the state to experiment with private operation of some prisons.

Another connection is the US Military Academy. Before graduating from Harvard's law and business schools, CCA treasurer and major investor Doctor R. Crants was Beasley's West Point roommate. CCA stockholder Samuel W. Bartholomew, of the Nashville law firm Donelson, Stokes &Bartholomew, was their classmate ('66).

Three of Bartholomew's children are also stockholders. Another West Point alum and major CCA investor is T. Don Hutto, the corporation's executive vice-president. Hutto, an ex-prison guard who became commissioner of corrections in Virginia and Arkansas, has since 1984 been president of the American Correctional Association, which oversees prison accreditation standards. Unlike other corrections-related professional associations-the National Sheriffs Association, the National Conference of State Trial Judges, the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, and the American Bar Association--the ACA under Hutto's tenure has supported prison privatization.

While the prisons-for-profit trend has national dimensions, CCA leadership has focused much of the attention onto the South, where all of CCA's current contracts and most of its financial backers are located (investors include Vanderbilt University, Hospital Corporation of America, and that symbol of public service delivery, the Tennessee Valley Authority, itself often the target of privatization initiatives). Many members of CCA's management staff have worked in corrections departments in Southern states, including Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama.

Critics of corporate punishment have raised a number of issues which call the privatization trend into serious question. Tennessee Attorney General Michael Cody and the ACLU National Prison Project note that the state would retain ultimate legal and fiscal responsibility for assuring private prisons' compliance with state and federal constitutions and court orders. It also appears clear that governments cannot contract their civil liability to private concerns. Noting CCA's lack of a track record in operating a state prison for long-ternm adult offenders, Cody also questions its estimates of operating and capital expenses and doubts the state's

Page 5
ability to buy back its prisons in case of a private firm's bankruptcy, incompetence, or unwillingness to continue. Cody suggests that privatization might encourage the public to believe, mistakenly, that Tennessee can solve its corrections problems simply by building more prisons.

A 1985 Tennessee legislative report points out that privatizing does not mean that construction costs are not a liability of the state; rather, the liability has been deferred." Mark Gray of AFSCME wonders if an artifically low cost presented in an initial contract would lead to government dependency on the private firm, making it "impossible to resume operations in the future without huge capital investments. The private contractor is then in a position to raise its prices" in order to maximize profits. Former Minnesota corrections chief Ken Schoen has pointed to "defense" contractors' use of similar tactics as a way of "capitalizing on the public's fears to assure an ever-expanding system, while the basic insecurities remain."

Closely associated with such economic concerns is the question of just how a private firm will be able to operate prisons as inexpensively as it claims. Public employee unions like AFSCME and the Tennessee State Employees Association point to workers' loss of civil service rules and benefits under private prison managers, along with the possibility of lower wages, a minimal workforce, an anti-union atmosphere, and inadequate training of correctional officers. It may be no accident that corrections capitalists' favorite hunting ground for contracts has been the historically low-wage and under-unionized South. And, whether they are called "prison guards" or "correctional officers," those workers who staff our society's cages are already among the lowest paid of all government employees.

Certainly, prisoners themselves could suffer harmful effects from possible cost-cutting for the sake of profit maximization. CCA's initial proposal to Tennessee proclaims the intention of developing a "full-employment economy within the correctional system." Given the history of Tennessee's and other Southern states' "privatization" and "profitization" of prisons, one might be excused for expecting some contemporary variations on the old convict lease systems and chain gangs. Journalist Ronnie Dugger's discomfort over the proposed privatization of the Texas prison system might also apply to other Southern states: "In the company prison, we will be putting state-sentenced inmates under the command of the employees of the corporation and forcing the state-sentenced inmates to labor for the profit of the corporation. What will keep a privately-owned Texas prison from being in its very nature a state-created system of slave labor for private profit?" Constitutionally, slavery is legal as punishment for crime, and our Southern prison populations are, of course, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black and Hispanic.

Apprehensions on the part of prisoner advocates and those who abhor slavery may not be unfounded when one considers the professional history of T. Don Hutto, the man CCA touts as its foremost corrections expert. The CCA's executive vice-president's career includes a stint as warden of the Ramsey Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the 1960s, when the system of using inmates to guard and discipline other inmates, later outlawed in federal court, was "at its strongest," according to the Texas Observer. A 1985 article in The Nation reported that during Hutto's tenure as corrections commissioner in Arkansas the US Supreme Court ruled that state's prison system unconstitutional and found that officials "evidently tried to operate their prisons at a profit." "Inmates were required to work on prison farms ten hours a day, six days a week, often without suitable clothing or shoes, using mule-drawn plows and tending crops by hand....Punishment for minor misconduct included lashing with a wooden-handled leather strap...and administering electric shocks to 'various sensitive parts of the inmate's body.' The trial court called the prisons 'a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world.'" When confronted with this criticism, a CCA offical responded that The Nation essay was "a libelous article" and that Hutto had in fact cleaned up the unconstitutional Arkansas system.

The questions raised by Hutto's track record and by a look at the history of profit-making out of the hides of prisoners were echoed by Michael Walzer in The New Republic: "Helpless men and women have never fared well at the hands of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The incentive system is all wrong. Who will look after the interests of prisoners? Who will be watching the prison owners as they run their 'own' business?"

Prisoners and their advocates in many Southern states lock at the decades of class-action litigation efforts to remedy their unconstitutional prison systems (now ten years in Tennessee) and wonder how much longer it would have taken had the prisons been

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privately owned during that time. The potential for foot-dragging and buck-passing would surely increase substantially under private ownership and implementation of state functions. The Tennessee Senate Speaker's favorable response to the privatization concept speaks volumes: "If somebody else ran it, somebody else would be in court. We wouldn't."

An analogy with recent corporate mobility trends, another point made by Walzer, is especially striking when seen in a Southern context: "This is probably the chief economic advantage of privatization-that it offers a (temporary) escape from the enforcement of constitutional norms. The resulting savings are like the profit added when a factory moves from a union to a non-union territory. If the union catches up, the old situation is restored. Similarly, if the courts catch up, we will find oursleves again where we are now, with judges struggling to do what state legislatures and Congress ought to do-reform the prison system."

Perhaps the most critical flaw in the privatization move is that it is inherently expansionist. A corporation paid per prisoner and per diem will look to lock up more and more people for longer and longer stretches. Recall the historic Southern practice of determining the county sheriffs' pay according to their jail counts. CCA's Tennessee proposal assumed a steadily expanding prison population (despite the falling crime rate), and its preferred per diem method of being paid has already led to cost overruns for local taxpayers at its Chattanooga penal farm.

The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than any country in the world, with two exceptions: South Africa and the Soviet Union. Some of our Southern states rank even higher than those nations. We ought to be reducing our costly, ineffective, cruel, race- and class-biased overreliance on incarceration in favor of community-based alternative sentences for non-violent offenders, such as victim restitution programs. Other effective alternatives to incarceration include intensive probation, community service work, victim-offender mediation, and required drug and alcohol treatment, GED preparation, vocational training, and job placement. Such options are used frequently with white collar criminals, but perpetrators of street crimes are scarce in these programs.

Organizations such as AFSCME, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Sheriffs Association, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners have all voiced the fear of an inevitable expansionism in this new "growth industry." Vera Institute's Michael Smith, noting that "the private sector has an enormous investment in stimulating demand," fears corporate advertising campaigns to heighten the public's fear of crime and trigger a "lock 'em up" reaction resulting in an increasing number of cages, captives, and dollars.

NACJP director Mark Cunniff, calling CCA's Tennessee takeover proposal "incredible," points out that "private contractors can lobby in ways that a public agency cannot." When those doing the lobbying are close friends and political advisers of governors and legislators, many of the traditional lobbying techniques will be unnecessary.

Perhaps Ken Schoen has put it best: "Private operators whose growth depends upon an expanding prison population may push for ever harsher sentences. With the public's unabating fear of crime, and the lawmakers shrinking from any move that appears to be soft on criminals, the developing private prison lobby will be hard to resist. Any drop in the crime rate will be attributed to long prison sentences. An increase will add weight to the call for more prisons. And the taxpayers will finance the profit-makers while double-locking their doors at night."

Michael Smith says that the scenario sketched out above "worries me enough so that I want to look first at making government innovative and responsive." This points toward a possible third option, between the inefficient and incompetent status quo and the CCA-type prisons-for-profit. Walzer suggests, "...we should deputize nongovernmental agencies to perform some prison-like functions....we all might benefit, prisoners, too, from a little flexibility, unorthodoxy, experimentation. But this will have to be the work of nonprofit agencies, with publicly recognized programs and explicit authorization. We should not be contracting out, as if these were not our prisoners; we should be bringing new ideas into the orbit of public service."

The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from all this is simply that the citizens and legislatures of our Southern states should avoid the new "dungeons for dollars" game like the plague. The privatization debate distracts us from the real issue of our society's failure to deal with crime in any way other than a knee-jerk, repressive fashion. This is especially true in the South, which tends to have the highest incarceration rates, the longest sentences, and the most executions.

Most citizens-white and black, rich and poor, male and female-regularly report that crime and punishment constitute one of the most salient and urgent issues in their lives. Almost no one, however, is satisfied with our criminal justice system as it is.

As I have suggested, there are alternative approaches to the issue of crime and punishment, but only a few prisoners, lawyers, academics, and prison reform advocates seem to know or care much about them. As in the field of health, our society's primary approach to crime ought to be a preventive, environmental, "public health" strategy. The implications of this approach reach beyond even such a necessary action as the denial of easy handgun access. We must resist and recast the media glorification of violence, insist upon economic and political equality irrespective of race and sex, confront the climate of national militarism, and reconstruct an American culture and economic system propelled by human greed. Meanwhile, we will continue to have to lock up violent, dangerous offenders, but, for the many others, our motto should be "from the cage to the community," which is largely where the problem is and must be dealt with. We must refuse the exploitation of public hysteria and institutional fatigue by the entrepreneurs of captivity.

Harmon L Wray, Jr., lives in Nashville where he is a staff consultant with Project Return and teaches prison ministry at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Go to Article List for Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 3, 1989
Previous: The Shame of Contra Aid Article Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 18-19

The Beck Center Southern Regional Council

Posted by lois at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2007

Real Cost of Prisons Project Website Reminder

The Real Cost of Prisons Project website (www.realcostofprisons.org) is constantly updated with new research and papers focused on providing ideas and information to strengthen the work of organizers, family members, students, policy makers and others. PDFs of our three comic book are on line in addition to individual comic book pages which can be downloaded free and used for flyers, tabling, newsletters. There also links to hundreds of organizations. Two of our newest sections: "Comix from Inside" and "Writing from Prison" include political and analytical writing and artwork by men and women who are incarcerated.

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2007

In Memory of Harmon Wray

The Tennessean
Wednesday, 07/25/07
Prisoner advocate Harmon Wray, 60, dies
By John Egerton
For The Tennessean

Harmon L. Wray was about to graduate from Southwestern College in Memphis in April 1968 when, a short distance across town, an assassin's bullet took the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the lightning rod of the Civil Rights Movement.

Countless people around the world have been moved to lives of service
by the martyrdom of Dr. King. Harmon Wray was one of them.

When Mr. Wray died of a massive brain hemorrhage in Nashville's St. Thomas Hospital Tuesday, he was in his 40th year of selfless commitment to a particular class of American outcasts: the more than 3 million men and women in the nation's prison population.

"He left campus to march with the sanitation workers in Memphis," recalled Mr. Wray's mother, Celeste Wray, "and he was in the audience when Dr. King made his last speech, the night before he was killed. No mother could want a better son than Harmon. He gave his life for others. I was intensely proud of him."

Mr. Wray was born in Memphis on Nov. 10, 1946, the only child of Celeste Hardy and her husband, Harmon Lee Wray. He graduated with honors from Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in 1968 and then earned a master's degree in religion from Duke University in 1970.

During that time, he entered the process of ordination into the ministry of the United Methodist Church.

Though he pursued a doctorate in ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the 1970s, Mr. Wray stopped short of completing his dissertation - a study of religious radicals in the 20th-century South - and chose to be an activist rather than a scholar.

"I got what I came for," he told friends after he quit. "I got the experience, the knowledge, the personal associations. The only thing I left behind was the degree itself, and it meant nothing to me - and even less to the people I wanted to serve."

It was during those years that Mr. Wray began working with two Nashville-based organizations, the Southern Prison Ministry and Tennesseans Against the Death Penalty, both of which had religious motivations but no church affiliation. He was employed from time to time at the state and national levels of the United Methodist Church to work with task forces on various social issues.

"Somewhere along in there," recalled Don Beisswenger, now retired from the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty, "Harmon decided not to seek ordination. It was an act of personal integrity for him, based on his understanding of the radical gospel of Jesus."

In the 1990s, while teaching part-time as an adjunct professor at the divinity school, Mr. Wray developed a course entitled "Theology and Politics of Criminal Justice." Over time, he inspired others to explore the subject with him - members of the divinity school faculty, professors from elsewhere in Nashville, people from beyond the campuses.

Mr. Wray's inspiration was to teach classes at Riverbend Prison in Nashville, the main correctional facility in Tennessee, with equal numbers of divinity school students and inmates taking part. He first got clearances to do that in 2003. In every academic term since then, he and some of his colleagues have taught there.

"Harmon gave much of lasting value to this institution and its population, and he will be sadly missed," said Riverbend warden Ricky Bell.

Tennessee Corrections Commissioner George Little said Mr. Wray "touched many lives at Riverbend, staff and prisoners alike. I greatly respected and valued his unique commitment, his passion and compassion. He was a bridge between the inside and the outside, and what he started will not die with him."

Three of Mr. Wray's colleagues - social worker Judy Parks, Lipscomb University historian Richard Goode, and Janet Wolf, a United Methodist minister who also teaches at American Baptist College in Nashville - met late Tuesday at Riverbend with more than a dozen inmates to give them the news of Mr. Wray's death.

These were some of the prisoners' reactions: "He donated a piece of himself to us, and he will be with us always . . . More than a teacher, advocate, friend, he was family, and this is like a death in the family . . . He told us, 'You are my church.'"

A memorial service for Mr. Wray, who donated his organs for transplant, will be Saturday at 10 a.m. in the sanctuary of Belmont United Methodist Church in Nashville, with former Tennessee Bishop Kenneth Carder and several Nashville UMC ministers presiding.

There will be visitation for family and friends tomorrow evening from 6 to 8 p.m. at Edgehill UMC at 15th and Edgehill Avenues.

The family requests that contributions be sent to Edgehill UMC, Box 128258, Nashville 37212, designated to a fund for the continuation of Mr. Wray's work.

Mr. Wray was married for a few years in the early 1970s, but the love of his life was Judy Parks, a career social worker (now retired). Janet Wolf knew them as a couple for more than 30 years.
"Harmon had three great loves in his life," Wolf said. "Jesus, Judy, and justice."
---------------------------------------------------------
The Harmon Wray Fund has been set up at Edgehill United Methodist Church which will be used to continue Harmon’s prison ministry life work. Please write checks to Edgehill United Methodist Church noting that the gift is for The Harmon Wray Fund and send it to:

Edgehill United Methodist Church
The Harmon Wray Fund
PO Box 128258
Nashville, TN 37212

------------------------------------------------------------
Harmon Wray died Tuesday, July 24, 2007 from complications of a massive stroke. His ministry with Edgehill United Methodist Church, the Tennessee Conference, Vanderbilt University and beyond provided profound inspiration for those who knew and loved Harmon and his life partner, Judy Parks. Harmon’s ability to see himself as “no better than” was a gift. He regarded people on death row to be as human and as filled with God’s spirit as any of the rest of us. For many years he was a volunteer in the Visitor On Death Row program which fostered friendships between free world people and those condemned to death by the state. He was willing to put everything on the line for his beliefs and did so many times over. His ear was available to people regardless of their station in life.

Visitation will be Friday evening, July 27 at Edgehill UMC (15th and Edgehill Ave.) from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. The Memorial Service will be Saturday morning, July 28 at 10 a.m. at Belmont UMC. Condolences may be sent to: Judy Parks, 1109 Graybar Lane, Nashville, TN 37204

Tuesday, July 24, 2007
In Memory of Harmon Wray

Harmon Wray, a tireless crusader to end the death penalty, suffered a massive stroke yesterday and was removed from life support this afternoon. Harmon was an organizing member of TCASK and has been relentless in his work to end the death penalty in our state. Harmon was a champion for prison reform and upholding the dignity of those who are incarcerated.

As a teacher and author, he educated countless numbers of people concerning the myriad problems with our current criminal justice system. As adjunct faculty of Vanderbilt Divinity School, Harmon created and coordinated a class at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, comprised of both Vanderbilt students and inmates. Harmon was also a founder of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Tennessee, seeking to transform the current criminal justice system from a system primarily focused on punishment to one which facilitates healing and restoration. Most recently, he authored, Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for our Failed Prison System.

Harmon was formerly with the Tennessee Conference Correctional Ministries staff of the Methodist Church and the General Board of Mission. Harmon continued to be an active member of Edgehill United Methodist Church.

Harmon Wray followed the way of Jesus to the end, still giving of himself, even in death as an organ donor. He took Jesus' call to visit the prisoner to heart and spent his life as a fierce advocate for those who are incarcerated. I count him as a mentor and a friend, and today my heart is very heavy as I cannot imagine the world without him. Still, I know that Harmon's spirit will remain with us and will continue to inspire all of us as we struggle together to end the death penalty in Tennessee.

Stacy Rector
Executive Director
Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing
PO Box 120552
Nashville, TN 37212
615-256-3906

Posted by lois at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2007

NY: Subway Workers Mourn Marvin Franklin, a Colleague, Mentor, Artist and Friend

May 6, 2007, NY Times
Subway Workers Mourn a Colleague, Mentor, Artist and Friend
By MICHAEL POWELL

In a sea of church ladies with wide white hats and deacons in dark suits sat 120 broad-shouldered men wearing orange-and-yellow reflective vests, transit workers come to bid goodbye to one of their own.

And no one at the funeral of Marvin Franklin, who was killed one week ago, carried the wounds of that day more visibly than Jeff Hill, a lithe young worker who stood alongside Mr. Franklin as the G train bore down.

Mr. Hill came to the funeral in a neck brace, his forearm scratched raw. After a round of song and prayer, he took the pulpit.

He described Mr. Franklin as a mentor who offered pointers on life and art. Then, as if reliving the moment, he described walking across the tracks that night. His words tumbled out one upon the other.

“I saw a light behind Marvin,” Mr. Hill said. “I saw a light above his head. I couldn’t even yell.” Mr. Hill’s chest heaved, he shook his head and continued: “Marvin was squeezed behind me, I saw Marvin squeezed and mushed between the train and the platform.”

Tears began to roll down Mr. Hill’s face. Sobs and supportive shouts of “Amen!” rose in response from the church pews.

“Mrs. Franklin” — Mr. Hill looked at Mr. Franklin’s widow, Tenley, who sat in the front pew — “I love you with all my heart. And I love Marvin, too.”

Everyone in the church rose to their feet and clapped, and transit workers held clenched fists aloft.

Mr. Williams, a 55-year-old husband and father, died last Sunday night in the subway tunnels where he had labored for two decades.

Yesterday his coffin sat inside New Covenant Church of Christ in Queens Village, cloaked in carnations and lilies and within touching distance of his wife, three children, five sisters and four brothers.

In a post-modern city that often seems removed from its smokestack past, these men and women work at an industrial-age craft with all the dangers that implies. Since 1946, at least 238 subway workers have been killed on the job; nine in the last seven years. Mr. Franklin was the second track worker killed in less than a week.

Old hands at the funeral described feeling the vibration of the tracks, listening to the rumble and trying to determine from which direction a many-ton subway train is approaching.

Few maintain the illusion of fearlessness. “It’s like you’re walking in a bad neighborhood — you never, ever relax,” said James Tuck, a 59-year-old track worker.

Mr. Franklin was killed in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn as he and Mr. Hill were carrying a dolly across the G track toward the A and C lines track, which was undergoing work. Mr. Hill said they had followed safety precautions. “It was regular practice what we were doing,” he said. “Don’t let the media tell you otherwise.”

The New York City Transit Authority suspended track maintenance projects for a few days last week. The authority and the unions are preparing new safety measures and training.

Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, escorted Mr. Hill to the church in Queens.

“I wish I could say no more sad and horrible thing will happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “It is extremely, extremely difficult and dangerous work.”

Mr. Franklin was a son of the South Jamaica projects and passed his adult life laboring in subway tunnels. But art sustained him. He earned a degree in illustrative arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology and carried a sketch pad to work, drawing his fellow workers and passengers and handing out the sketches as he left. (Mr. Franklin’s self-portrait adorned the Order of Service for his funeral).

Bob Ritter, a jowly 57-year-old trackman with white hair pulled back in a ponytail, carefully unfolded a sketch that Mr. Franklin had done of him. He patted his belly. “The sketch was too good,” he said. “Reality hurts, you know?”

Mr. Franklin often studied at the Art Students League. He wanted to retire and open an art gallery, and give the proceeds to the homeless.

Midway through the service, Michael Williams, a muscular track worker in a pinstriped suit, rose and walked to the front of the church. “I’m Mikey, because that’s the name Marvin gave me,” Mr. Williams said. “I called him Marvelous, because he was.”

Mikey and Marvelous lived a half-dozen blocks apart in Queens and drove to work together. Mr. Williams described his bearded friend with a booming laugh, who at holiday parties “danced with everyone — all the women, anyway.” (Mr. Franklin was married once before, and his former wife, who was the minister, noted that it was a measure of the man that she could deliver the eulogy yesterday while his widow listened.)

“Whenever I would worry about money, Marvin would say: ‘It’s going to be all right, Mikey.’ ”

Mr. Williams was there that night his friend died. He heard him cry out twice — “Man under!” Mr. Williams found his friend’s boot and, farther down the track, his body.

Mr. Williams fought to hold his composure, and did not lose it.

“Marvin had a gift,” Mr. Williams said. “So I want to thank you, Marvelous, for enriching my life.”

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2007

John Brentlinger- writer, activist, philosopy professor

John Brentlinger; UMass philosophy professor
3/20/2007

NORTHAMPTON - John Allen Brentlinger, University of Massachusetts philosophy professor, writer, photographer, jazz trumpet musician, poet, and activist, died Tuesday morning, March 6, 2007 surrounded by his loving wife, Sandy Mandel, sons Bruce, Chris, and Peter Brentlinger, daughter Katherine Brentlinger Mahmood, their spouses and partners, and a few close friends. While participating in a clinical trial with significant future medical potential, he died of complications from cancer. He was 72 years old.

The son of the late Ralph Fusen Brentlinger and Pattye Wallace Brentlinger, John was born in Sapulpa, Okla. during the Depression. He enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, and was stationed in Guam. While on Guam he was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he earned his baccalaureate degree. He went on to complete his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Yale University, was hired to teach Greek philosophy in the University of Massachusetts Philosophy Department, and taught undergraduate and graduate philosophy until his retirement in 1996. His first book, The Symposium of Plato (1970), illustrated by Leonard Baskin, continues to be regarded as an important contribution to the field of philosophy.

John was profoundly influenced by and came to political maturity during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of intensive and exciting political and cultural transformation. During those years John turned Left and never looked back, becoming a Socialist, a Marxist philosopher, and an activist. In 1973, he and Ann Ferguson were among the co-founders of the Socialist/Feminist Philosophers Association (SOFPHIA), which continues to support the innovative work and thinking of a national network of progressive philosophers. In the early 1980s John was inspired by land rescuers in Puerto Rico, documenting their struggle in his book Villa Sin Miedo: Presente!. It was during that era that John was also first introduced to the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. What began as a burgeoning political interest blossomed into a committed life-long love affair, particularly with the community of artists and artisans of Solentiname. In Nicaragua, John found "sacred places and events created by people in an unself-conscious, communal process of self-definition" and in those places and with those people, John felt a deep and loving solidarity. His book, The Best of What We Are: Reflections on the Nicaraguan Revolution (1995), noted to be of "immense philosophical significance," is based on John's experiences in Nicaragua over a period of more than 20 years. In 1999 he founded an NGO, the Solentiname Friendship Group of Western Massachusetts, which works with its Nicaraguan counterpart, the Union de Pintores y Artesano de Solentiname, to promote education, healthcare, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, and eco-tourism. While the material aid and support to the Nicaraguan community is significant, the reciprocal relationships established through this solidarity work improves the quality of life for all the participants. In this spirit, John organized and curated Solentiname art exhibits throughout the United States, with all proceeds benefiting this project.

John was a long-time resident of Leverett and moved to the Bay State community of Florence in 2003. As a member of this community, John became active in and gave sermons at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence as well as other congregations in New England. At the time of his death, he was completing a new book, The Unbroken Circle: U.S. and Nicaraguan Communities in Solidarity.

Besides his wife and children, he will be mourned by his adored grandchildren, Zara, Zamyaa, Preston, Evan, and Rayyan; his brother, William Wallace Brentlinger, and his wife, Ruth; sister Frances Joiner; a loving extended family, including Henrietta Mandel, Ann Ferguson and her partner Carol Shea; Elena Pineda and her family, many close friends; the members of the Solentiname Friendship Group; and the people of Isla San Fernando/Elvis Chavarria, Solentiname, Nicaragua.

A memorial celebration of John's life will be held on May 6 at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence at 4 p.m. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Solentiname Friendship Group/Education Fund, c/o Ann Browning, P.O. Box 2006, Ashfield, MA, 01330 and the Cancer Connection of Florence, MA, 01060.

Posted by lois at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2007

Barbara Gittings, 74, Prominent Gay Rights Activist Since ’50s, Dies

March 15, 2007, NY Times
Barbara Gittings, 74, Prominent Gay Rights Activist Since ’50s, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX

Barbara Gittings, a prominent gay rights activist who a decade before the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 was agitating for the rights of lesbians and gay men, died on Feb. 18 at her home in Kennett Square, Pa. She was 74.

The cause was breast cancer, said her partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen.

At a time when few gay men and women dared come out in private, much less in public, Ms. Gittings was a vocal — and highly visible — figure in the fledgling gay rights movement. In the late 1950s, she founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national organization for lesbians. In the 1960s, she took part in early gay rights demonstrations at the White House and elsewhere. In the early 1970s, she helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to change its stance on homosexuality; in 1973, the association rescinded its definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

M
“She was one of the rare people in the homophile movement — before Stonewall — who took a militant stance,” David Carter, the author of “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” (St. Martin’s, 2004), said in a telephone interview. “And she not only took a militant stance, but she was in the forefront.”

Ms. Gittings also worked to make information about gay men and lesbians more widely available in libraries. Though not a librarian by training, she was for many years the head of the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force. (It is known today as the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Round Table.) In that capacity, she oversaw and edited the association’s comprehensive bibliography of literature by and about gay men and lesbians.

As Ms. Gittings often said in interviews, she became keenly aware of the need for such a bibliography as a young woman, when she scoured local libraries, seeking, but seldom finding, something that would help her understand her own life.

Barbara Gittings was born on July 31, 1932, in Vienna, where her father was a member of the United States diplomatic corps. Returning to the United States when Barbara was young, the family eventually settled in Wilmington, Del. When she was a teenager, her father caught her reading “The Well of Loneliness,” the 1928 novel of lesbian love by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. He told her to burn the book. He did so by letter, for he could not bring himself to speak to her.

Ms. Gittings entered Northwestern University, intending to study drama. But she was increasingly distracted by the need to learn as much as she could about homosexuality. She haunted the libraries of Chicago, unearthing little that was relevant and less that was encouraging.

“I had to find bits and pieces under headings like ‘sexual perversion’ and ‘sexual aberration’ in books on abnormal psychology,” Ms. Gittings told the publication American Libraries in 1999. “I kept thinking, ‘It’s me they’re writing about, but it doesn’t feel like me at all.’ ”

She left Northwestern after her freshman year, and throughout her decades of activism supported herself with clerical jobs. In 1958, commuting from her home in Philadelphia, Ms. Gittings started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, which was founded in San Francisco in 1955; she later edited the organization’s national newsletter, The Ladder. In 1965, she took part in one of the first gay rights pickets of the White House, an effort to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in federal employment.

Ms. Gittings received many awards, among them honorary membership in the American Library Association. The Free Library of Philadelphia named its gay and lesbian collection for her. This week, the New York Public Library acquired the papers of Ms. Gittings and Ms. Lahusen, which chronicle more than half a century in the gay rights movement.

Besides Ms. Lahusen, her companion of 46 years, Ms. Gittings is survived by a sister, Eleanor Gittings Taylor of San Diego. With Ms. Lahusen, Ms. Gittings lived for many years in Philadelphia and Wilmington before moving to Kennett Square in January.

“Before Barbara died, we went jointly into an assisted-living facility here,” Ms. Lahusen said by telephone. “Our last bit of activism was to come out in the newsletter of our assisted-living facility.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/obituaries/15gittings.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

Peter H. Morse-Pioneer and Leader in Harm Reduction Policy and Practice

San Francisco Chronicle - January 19, 2007 Peter H. Morse, Jr. 36, a pioneer and leader in harm reduction policy and practice, passed away on January 13, 2007. Dr. Morse was fiercely committed to protecting the health and well-being of drug users and their communities by reducing drug-related harm. His work in these areas has helped make harm reduction part of public policy and public consciousness. As the Naloxone Distribution Program Coordinator for the Drug Overdose Prevention Education (D.O.P.E.) Project of San Francisco, Dr. Morse helped to forge a groundbreaking partnership with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to provide naloxone at needle exchange sites throughout the city. Naloxone is an opioid antagonist that counters the deadly effects of overdose by heroin or other opiates. Dr. Morse helped establish and advised numerous syringe exchange programs throughout the country. He has been a member of the advisory board of the North American Syringe Exchange Network since 2001. He was currently serving as the advisory board chair for the Homeless Youth Alliance, an agency that provides critical services, including syringe exchange, to homeless youth in San Francisco. He was a member of the Injection Drug User Taskforce of the California HIV Planning Group, and was appointed to the San Francisco HIV Prevention Planning Council Substance Use and Structural Interventions Committee. Dr. Morse currently worked as the Project Coordinator of the Harm Reduction Coalition Syringe Exchange Technical Assistance Program and was working to expand syringe access in California. He was a longtime volunteer at the San Francisco Needle Exchange, and before that at the syringe exchange of the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center when he lived in New York City. He was also a member of the Moving Equipment Syringe Distribution Collective of New York City. Dr. Morse also worked as an interviewer, counselor, and project coordinator for University of California San Francisco's UFO Study, a hepatitis prevention focused health study of injection drug using youth. Dr. Peter H. Morse was born in Royal Oak, Michigan. He was educated at DePauw University, and received his doctorate in history from Binghamton University in 2006. In his research, he worked to understand the role of race and gender in the formation of political identity by members of radical industrial organizations in the United States during the early twentieth century He was an avid bibliophile and political activist, and was a member of the Bound Together Anarchist Book Collective. Dr. Morse was also a DJ, bringing electronic dance music to people in New York City, San Francisco, the Nevada Test Site, and Black Rock City, Nevada. Pete Morse is survived by his partner of 11 years, Liz Turner. The couple lived in Berkeley, California. He is also survived by his parents Pete and Patty Morse of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; his sister Carrie Morse of Washington, D.C. and his brother and sister-in-law, Dan and Meredith Morse of Berkley, Michigan. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to: Tenderloin Health/Homeless Youth Alliance, Attention: Mary Howe, P.O. Box 170427, San Francisco, CA 94117.

Posted by lois at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2007

Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, an Expert on Nuts, Dies

February 4, 2007, NY Times
Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, an Expert on Nuts, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Elizabeth Tashjian, who debated whether she was a nut culturist or a nut artist, but was indisputably, well, nuts enough about nuts to win fame (but not fortune) as matriarch of the Nut Museum in Old Lyme, Conn., died last Sunday in Old Saybrook, Conn. She was 94.

Ms. Tashjian hated being called “the Nut Lady” and died without fulfilling her dream of opening a nut theme park certain to surpass Disneyland. (Her reasoning: Squirrels are cuter than a certain mouse.)

Her death was confirmed by Christopher B. Steiner, a professor of art history and museum studies at Connecticut College, who in 2002 rescued Ms. Tashjian’s nuts, nut art, nut jewelry and a Nativity scene made completely of nuts from being thrown away.

That collection, the Nut Museum, had filled a room of Ms. Tashjian’s 17-room Gothic Revival mansion. The objects have since been in museum and library exhibitions.

“She became a visionary avant-garde artist,” said Dr. Steiner, who is dedicated to preserving, interpreting and communicating Ms. Tashjian’s legacy.

Dr. Steiner said that Ms. Tashjian began as an academic painter who liked nuts as a subject and started her museum in 1972 as a “cabinet of curiosity.” These “cabinets,” which emerged during the Renaissance, were rooms stuffed with intriguing objects about which people told stories.

Or sang songs, in the case of Ms. Tashjian. She performed her composition “Nuts Are Beautiful,” the nut anthem, for visitors, to whom she also gave free cider and coffeecake. She told stories about a bearded dwarf dwelling within every peanut embryo. (Admission at first was one nut, later rising to $3 and one nut.)

Her museum fits comfortably within an American tradition of enthrallment with odd collections, including museums of vacuum cleaners, toilet seats, mustard, postcards, potted meat, Antarctic dogs and dirt. But it aspired to be an art museum.

It contained mainly artworks by Ms. Tashjian, including her “Mask of the Unknown Nut” sculpture. The many varieties of nuts, including the 35-pound Coco de mer, which resembles buttocks, from the Seychelles, were gifts from patrons. So were many of the artifacts, like toys derived from nuts.

Ms. Tashjian’s second act in life was as a public personality on television and radio. She appeared on the shows of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Howard Stern and Chevy Chase, who kissed her hand twice and won her heart. She often took along her huge, disturbingly suggestive Coco de mer nut.

Mr. Steiner said it was arguable whether she was exploited by the news media, exploited it or played it to a draw.

His suspicion that she was the joker, not the joke, is reflected in the title of his forthcoming book, “Performing the Nut Museum: Elizabeth Tashjian and the Art of the Double Entendre.”

In her twilight years as a gaunt, four-foot-tall woman with a sing-song voice, she became a symbol of defiance, as she vainly fought to keep her home-cum-museum. A court declared her incompetent, and named guardians who sold it to pay her bills.

In 2005 the filmmaker Don Bernier made a documentary, “In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian.” Marian Masone of the Film Society of Lincoln Center wrote, “Bernier’s lovely, touching film asks the question, was she really nuts?”

Elizabeth Yegsa Tashjian was born in 1912 in Manhattan, the daughter of Armenian immigrants. Her father was a prosperous rug trader, and her mother came from an aristocratic family with a castle. They divorced when she was 7.

She studied at the New York School of Applied Design for Women and the National Academy of Design, where, The New York Times reported in 1929, she won a prize. She was also a gifted violinist.

“The art and the music galloped together,” she said in an interview with The Hartford Courant in 2005.

As a child, she played with nuts, then painted them. As an art student, she submitted a painting of a nutcracker chasing Brazil nuts to a juried art competition.

She and her mother moved to the Old Lyme mansion in 1950, and her mother died in 1959. Until she fell ill in 2002, Ms. Tashjian lived there alone. She never married, held a regular job or learned to drive. She left no immediate survivors.

She claimed not to know the word “nut” meant crazy until a patron shocked her by offering his wife for the “nut” portion of her admission fee. She resolved to end this pejorative use of her favorite word, in the process becoming, she said, a nutty philosopher.

In an interview with The Washington Post in 1999, she shared an insight: “To reveal its inner self,” she said, “the nut needs the nutcracker.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2007

Mandela leads tributes to Adelaide Tambo

Mandela leads tributes to Adelaide Tambo
Associated Press
Thursday February 1, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The former South African president Nelson Mandela today paid tribute to his friend and fellow anti-apartheid campaigner Adelaide Tambo, who died yesterday.

Ms Tambo, the widow of the African National Congress hero Oliver Tambo, died at her home in Johannesburg, an ANC statement said. She was 77.

Like her husband, Ms Tambo - who was affectionately known as Ma Tambo or Mama Adelaide - was a lifelong political activist.

Mr Mandela, who shared her birthday, said he mourned the "passing away of a close personal friend, a comrade and one of the great heroines of our nation".

Article continues
"She was a mother to the liberation movement in exile, and a nationally revered figure in our new nation," he said in a statement released by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. "We pay tribute to a life dedicated to freedom and service."

The foundation said Mr Mandela was in Mozambique but would return to Johannesburg to offer his condolences and support to the Tambo family.

As family and friends gathered at their home, prominent figures throughout South African life paid tribute.

The Anglican archbishop, Njongonkulu Ndungane, said Ms Tambo was a woman of great dignity and courage, the South African Press Association reported.

"I myself have sought her wise counsel many times," he added. "She always showed great concern for the poor and for the moral values of the nation."

The British high commissioner, Paul Boateng, said Ms Tambo had left a huge gap in the lives of many in South Africa, Africa and the UK. "Her place in history and all our hearts is assured and her memory will live on forever," he said.

Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, said Ms Tambo's death "amounts to a loss to the entire country and the international community".

In her later years, Ms Tambo was an impassioned advocate of rights for the elderly and the disabled. She remained active in the ANC, but watched in anguish as South Africa was blighted by violence and HIV.

"I am 77 years old. The majority of women in this country are my children. Why are you not fighting for me?" she said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of a landmark anti-apartheid march by women last August.

Born on July 18 1929, Ms Tambo became involved in politics at the age of 10 when her 82-year-old grandfather was arrested in a police raid following a riot in which an officer had been killed.

He collapsed and, as she waited for him to regain consciousness, she decided to devote her life to the fight against white racist rule.

Five years later, she began working for the ANC as a courier while still studying. She joined the ANC Youth League, and was almost immediately elected as its chair. She met her future husband at the launch of a new youth league branch, agreeing to marry him in 1956. Three weeks before their wedding, he was arrested and charged, along with 155 other ANC members, including Mr Mandela, with high treason.

The wedding went ahead four days after the suspects were released on bail. The trial lasted for more than three years, ending in the acquittal of all the accused.

The Tambos fled from South Africa to London in 1960, acting on the advice of other ANC activists. While living in the UK, Ms Tambo helped the families of other exiles, working working as a nurse to support her family.

She is survived by three children, Thembi, Dali and Tselane.

Posted by lois at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2007

Father Robert Drinan, Ex-Congressman, Dies aat 86

January 28, 2007
Rev. Robert Drinan, Ex-Congressman, Dies at 86
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:09 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who -- over the objections of his superiors -- became the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday.

Drinan, 86, had suffered from pneumonia and congestive heart failure during the previous 10 days, according to a statement by Georgetown University.

''His death was peaceful, and he was surrounded by his family,'' said the Rev. John Langan, rector of the Georgetown University Jesuit Community where Drinan lived.

An internationally known human-rights advocate, Drinan represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House for 10 years during the turbulent 1970s, and he stepped down only after a worldwide directive from Pope John Paul II barring priests from holding public office.

He was elected in 1970, after he beat longtime Democratic Rep. Philip J. Philbin in a primary -- and again in the November election, when Philbin was a write-in candidate. The only other priest to serve in Congress was a nonvoting delegate from Michigan in 1823.

Although a poll at the time showed that 30 percent of the voters in his district thought it was improper for a priest to run for office, Drinan considered politics a natural extension of his work in public affairs and human rights.

His run for office came a year after he returned from a trip to Vietnam, where he said he discovered that the number of political prisoners being held in South Vietnam was rapidly increasing, contrary to State Department reports. And in a book the next year, he urged the Catholic Church to condemn the war as ''morally objectionable.''

He ran for Congress on an anti-Vietnam war platform. During his Congressional tenure, Drinan continued to dress in the robes of his clerical order and lived in a simple room in the Jesuit community at Georgetown.

But Drinan wore his liberal views more prominently. He opposed the draft, worked to abolish mandatory retirement and raised eyebrows with his more moderate views on abortion and birth control.

And he became the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon -- although the call wasn't related to the Watergate scandal, but what Drinan viewed as the administration's undeclared war against Cambodia.

''Can we be silent about this flagrant violation of the Constitution?'' Drinan demanded angrily back then. ''Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?''

Decades later, at the invitation of Congress, he testified against the impeachment of another president: Bill Clinton. Drinan said Clinton's misdeeds were not in the same league as Nixon's, and that impeachment should be for an official act, not a private one.

He told the Judiciary Committee members reviewing Clinton's case, that in 1974, ''the country knew there was extensive lawlessness in the White House. ... The documentation of appalling crimes was known by everyone. Abuse of power and criminality were apparent to the American people.''

Drinan left office in 1980 -- ''with regret and pain'' -- finally succumbing to the increased pressure from his superiors, including the Pope.

But he continued to be active in political causes. He served as president of the Americans for Democratic Action, crisscrossing the country giving speeches on hunger, civil liberties, and the perils of the arms race. He spoke out against President Reagan and President Bush, and lectured and wrote about gun control, world hunger, and the war on terrorism's impact on human rights.

He also took a post as professor of law at Georgetown University in 1981, where he taught courses on international human rights, constitutional law, civil liberties, legislation, ethics and professional responsibility.

Posted by lois at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2007

Mendy Samstein, 68, Dies; Championed Civil Rights

Mendy Samstein, 68, Dies; Championed Civil Rights
By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times, January 25, 2007

Mendy Samstein, who left graduate school to put himself in the forefront of the fight for black voting rights in Mississippi, enduring bombings and beatings in the crucial summer of 1964, died yesterday at his home in New Lisbon, N.Y. He was 68.

The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Nancy Cooper, said.

Mr. Samstein abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate in history to join the historic turmoil in the South and became known as an adept organizer and pull-no-punches speaker. He helped recruit and deploy the more than 800 college students, mainly white, who traveled from many states to rural Mississippi towns, mainly black, as part of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964.

He became a full-time organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Stokely Carmichael, who later became the group’s chairman, called him “one in a million.”

In “Ready for Revolution” (2003), which Ekwueme Michael Thelwell helped write, Mr. Carmichael said volunteers like Mr. Samstein stopped being white “except in the most superficial sense of the word.” He explained that they, too, experienced white hatred.

Mr. Samstein was one of nine committee workers in a house in McComb, Miss., on July 8, 1964, when three blasts ripped the house apart.

Abbie Hoffman, the mischievous radical whom Mr. Samstein had known at Brandeis, was at home in Massachusetts watching the news when he saw his friend crawling from the rubble. “It was then I decided to head South,” Mr. Hoffman said, according to “For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman” (1996), by Jonah Raskin.

In August 1964, Mr. Samstein, then a field secretary for the committee, told The New York Times about problems in rural Mississippi and said one county, Amite, had been under “a reign of terror.” Policemen pulled him from his car at a stoplight to beat him, Mr. Samstein’s wife said.

Mr. Samstein went on to work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s largely black delegation trying to supplant or join the all-white Mississippi delegation already chosen for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964. His radicalism flared when Bayard Rustin, the legendary civil rights organizer, suggested compromise. According to Taylor Branch in “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65” (1998), Mr. Samstein jumped up and shouted, “You’re a traitor, Bayard!”

The failure of the Freedom Democrats, the slowed pace of civil rights progress, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s own metamorphosis into a black nationalist group demoralized Mr. Samstein.

“I curse this country every day of my life because it made me hate it, and I never wanted to,” he said in an interview with Jack Newfield in “A Prophetic Minority” (1966).

Jehudah Menachem Mendel Samstein was born on July 20, 1938, in Manhattan. His father, a kosher butcher became ill, switched to real estate investing and died when Mendy was 10.

Mendy Samstein’s education began in a yeshiva and continued at Stuyvesant High School. He majored in European history at Brandeis and earned a master’s degree in the subject from Cornell. He was a history Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago when he was offered a teaching job at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He grabbed it to be near the civil rights movement.

His wife said his ardor came from his deep feelings about the Holocaust. “He did not want to permit that kind of destruction of a race to happen again,” Ms. Cooper said.

Bob Moses, who led a federation of civil rights groups in Mississippi, invited him to the state, where he worked with Allard K. Lowenstein, later a New York congressman, to recruit and train students from Stanford and Yale for a mock election in October 1963. The “election” did not count, but 80,000 “voters” vividly demonstrated blacks’ electoral clout.

Mr. Samstein met Nancy Cooper the same weekend the bodies of three slain civil rights workers were found. She had been a classmate of one, Andrew Goodman, at Queens College, and followed him south to teach in the so-called freedom schools.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Samstein is survived by his sons, Ivan, of Chicago, and Ben, of Manhattan; and a granddaughter.

After his civil rights days, Mr. Samstein organized against the Vietnam War, taught school, was a psychoanalyst and ran a summer camp, among other things. In 2000, he joined civil rights veterans to protest the handling of the presidential vote in Florida.

He also helped Mr. Moses with his Algebra Project, an effort to bring mathematical literacy to the poor. In a recent communication to Mr. Samstein’s family, Mr. Moses noted that it had not taken multitudes to bring change to Mississippi in the 1960s.

“It took a few people willing to risk everything,” he said.

Posted by lois at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2007

Itche Goldberg, 102; fixture in communist struggle and a teacher of Yiddish culture

Itche Goldberg, 102; fixture in communist struggle and a teacher of Yiddish culture
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post

January 9, 2007

Itche Goldberg, a Polish-born Jew who became a fixture in the communist struggle of the 1920s and '30s and later emerged as a writer, editor, publisher and teacher of Yiddish language and culture, died of cancer Dec. 27 in his New York home. He was 102.

After his family settled in Canada, Goldberg became involved in a Jewish fraternal group called the Workmen's Circle. He became a Yiddish instructor, initially in Canada and later in Philadelphia and New York. He was part of an ideological movement that used Yiddish to teach Jews about the international proletariat struggle.

He became a leading cultural figure in the International Workers Order, a communist-affiliated insurance and fraternal organization that had splintered from the Workmen's Circle.

He once said about the split, which occurred around 1930: "There was no question about our Jewishness or Jewish consciousness, and the Jewish consciousness led us very naturally to the Soviet Union. Here was Romania, anti-Semitic. Poland, which was anti-Semitic. Suddenly we saw how Jewish culture was developing in the Soviet Union. It was really breathtaking. You had the feeling that both the national problem was solved and the social problem was solved. This was no small thing. It was overpowering, and we were young."

Before the International Workers Order folded amid the communist witch hunt of the early 1950s, Goldberg spent two decades as cultural director of its Jewish section.

In that position, he edited several journals - including a children's publication with cartoons and stories - and oversaw secular Yiddish-language schools that peaked with 80,000 students in the United States and Canada.

He started a publishing concern for Jewish history texts and Yiddish songbooks, and in the 1970s and 1980s he taught Yiddish at New York's Queens College.

He also persevered in publishing Yiddishe Kultur, a literary and cultural magazine started in the late 1930s. He assumed the editorship in 1964, when his predecessor left for a kibbutz in Israel. Goldberg became a relentless fundraiser to maintain bimonthly publication, which became increasingly difficult. Yiddishe Kultur had a few hundred subscribers when it last went to press in 2004.

Eugene Orenstein, who teaches Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal and is a former student of Goldberg's, called his teacher one of the last links to a world that saw the blossoming of Yiddish culture in the West with the mass immigration of European Jews from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Besides promoting the work of modern Yiddish writers, many of whom he knew in the 1920s and '30s, Goldberg also translated varied works into Yiddish, from Latin classics to Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

Yitzhak Gutkind Goldberg was born in 1904 in Opatow, Poland. The family left for Warsaw in 1914, just before the start of World War I.

His father and older brother went ahead to Canada. Goldberg, his mother and four other siblings stayed in Poland six more years.

While they waited, Goldberg talked his way into a Hebrew teachers seminary in Warsaw. When the family was reunited in Toronto, where his father had become a junk dealer, Goldberg attended McMaster University in Ontario. Self-taught in English, he studied philosophy and economics until quitting school in his fourth year.

Goldberg gradually came to realize the horrors of Stalinist Russia and specifically the regime's murderous treatment of Jews. During his editorship of Yiddishe Kultur, Goldberg published a memorial issue every August honoring Yiddish writers executed under Stalin.

Goldberg was viewed as a far more avuncular figure in his later years and received a flurry of press attention as an eccentric and tenacious figure in a shrinking circle of Yiddish experts.

He believed that promoting Yiddish was critical to the survival of Jewish culture, especially as the language, estimated to have 12 million speakers in 1939, dwindled to half a million speakers.

"You get the impression that I'm full of fight?" he asked the New York Times in 2004. "I'm not really. I might as well tell you: I only have two dreams. One dream is that someone will knock on the door and I will open it and they give me a check for $150,000 for the magazine. Second dream is that someone knocks at the door and I open it up and he gives me a corned beef sandwich."

He is survived by his wife, Jennie Goldberg; two children, David Goldberg and Susan Goldberg, both of New York; two granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-goldberg9jan09,0,2044501.story?coll=la-home-obituaries

Posted by lois at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2006

James Brown, The Godfather of Soul, Dies at 73

December 26, 2006
James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul,’ Dies at 73
By JON PARELES

James Brown, the singer, songwriter, bandleader and dancer who indelibly transformed 20th-century music, died early yesterday in Atlanta. He was 73 and lived in Beech Island, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga.

Mr. Brown died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for pneumonia, said his agent, Frank Copsidas.

Mr. Brown sold millions of records in a career that lasted half a century. In the 1960s and 1970s he regularly topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, although he never had a No. 1 pop hit. Yet his music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers. His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop.

Mr. Copsidas said that Mr. Brown had participated in an annual Christmas toy giveaway in Augusta on Friday but had been hospitalized on Saturday. After canceling performances planned for midweek, Mr. Brown on Sunday night got his doctor’s approval to perform on Saturday in New Jersey and on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King’s nightclub in New York.

Mr. Copsidas said Mr. Brown used one of his best-known slogans to convey his dedication to his fans: “I’m the hardest working man in show business, and I’m not going to let them down.”

Through the years, Mr. Brown did not only call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” He also went by “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk” and “the Godfather of Soul,” and he was all of those and more.

His music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.

“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,” he wrote in an autobiography.

The funk Mr. Brown introduced in his 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” was both deeply rooted in Africa and thoroughly American. Songs like “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Cold Sweat,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Hot Pants” found the percussive side of every instrument and meshed sharply syncopated patterns into kinetic polyrhythms that made people dance.

Mr. Brown’s innovations reverberated through the soul and rhythm-and-blues of the 1970s and the hip-hop of the next three decades. The beat of a 1970 instrumental “Funky Drummer” may well be the most widely sampled rhythm in hip-hop.

Mr. Brown’s stage moves — the spins, the quick shuffles, the knee-drops, the splits — were imitated by performers who tried to match his stamina, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, and were admired by the many more who could not. Mr. Brown was a political force, especially during the 1960s; his 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” changed America’s racial vocabulary. He was never politically predictable; in 1972 he endorsed the re-election of Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Brown led a turbulent life, and served prison time as both a teenager and an adult. He was a stern taskmaster who fined his band members for missed notes or imperfect shoeshines. He was an entrepreneur who, at the end of the 1960s, owned his own publishing company, three radio stations and a Learjet (which he would later sell to pay back taxes). And he performed constantly: as many as 51 weeks a year in his prime.

Mr. Brown was born May 3, 1933, in a one-room shack in Barnwell, S.C. As he would later tell it, midwives thought he was stillborn, but his body stayed warm, and he was revived. When his parents separated four years later, he was left in the care of his aunt Honey, who ran a brothel in Augusta, Ga. As a boy he earned pennies buck-dancing for soldiers; he also picked cotton and shined shoes. He was dismissed from school because his clothes were too ragged.

He was imprisoned for petty theft in 1949 after breaking into a car, and paroled three years later. While in prison he sang in a gospel group. After he was released, he joined a group led by Bobby Byrd, which eventually called itself the Flames. At first, Mr. Brown played drums with the group and traded off lead vocals with other members. But with his powerful voice and frenzied, acrobatic dancing, he soon emerged as the frontman.

In 1955 the Flames recorded “Please Please Please” in the basement studio of a radio station in Macon, Ga. A talent scout heard it on local radio and signed the Flames to a recording contract with King Records. A second version, recorded in Cincinnati in 1956, became a million-selling single.

Nine follow-up singles were flops until, in 1958 a gospel-rooted ballad, “Try Me,” went to No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues chart. Mr. Brown followed up with more ballads, although the Flames’ stage shows would turn them into long, frenzied crescendos. His trademark routine of collapsing onstage, having a cape thrown over him and tossing it away for one more reprise, again and again, would leave audiences shouting for more.

In 1960 Mr. Brown’s version of “Think” put a choppy, Latin-flavored beat — hinting at the funk to come — behind a sustained vocal and pushed him back into the R&B Top 10 and the pop Top 40.

Mr. Brown had his first Top 20 pop hit in 1963 with “Prisoner of Love,” a ballad backed by an orchestra. But before those sessions he had done a series of shows at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the one on Oct. 24, 1962, was recorded. His label had not wanted to record the shows; Mr. Brown insisted. Released in 1963, “Live at the Apollo” — with screaming fans and galvanizing crescendos — revealed what the rhythm-and-blues circuit already knew, and became the No. 2 album nationwide.

James Brown and the Famous Flames toured nonstop through the 1960s. They were filmed in California for the “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released in 1965, which shows Mick Jagger trying to pick up Mr. Brown’s dance moves.

By the mid-1960s Mr. Brown was producing his own recording sessions. In February 1965, with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” he decided to shift the beat of his band: from the one-two-three-four backbeat to one-two-three-four. “I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat,” Mr. Brown said in 1990. “Simple as that, really.”

Actually it wasn’t that simple; drums, rhythm guitar and horns all kicked the beat around from different angles. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” won a Grammy Award as best rhythm-and-blues song, and it was only the beginning of Mr. Brown’s rhythmic breakthroughs. Through the 1960s and into the ’70s, Mr. Brown would make his funk ever more complex while stripping harmony to a bare minimum in songs like “Cold Sweat.” He didn’t immediately abandon ballads; songs like “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1966, mixed aching, bluesy lines with wrenching screams.

Amid the civil rights ferment of the 1960s Mr. Brown used his fame and music for social messages. He released “Don’t Be a Dropout” in 1966 and met with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to promote a stay-in-school initiative. Two years later “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” insisted, “We won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, Mr. Brown was due to perform in Boston. Instead of canceling his show, he had it televised. Boston was spared the riots that took place in other cities. “Don’t just react in a way that’s going to destroy your community,” he urged.

By the late 1960s Mr. Brown’s funk was part of pop, R&B and jazz: in his own hits, in songs by the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, and in the music of Miles Davis. It was also creating a sensation in Africa, where it would shape the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, the juju of King Sunny Ade and the mbalax of Youssou N’Dour.

Musicians who left Mr. Brown’s bands would also have a direct role in 1970s and 1980s funk; the saxophonist Maceo Parker, the trombonist Fred Wesley and the bassist Bootsy Collins were part of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and Mr. Parker also worked with Prince.

Through the early 1970s Mr. Brown’s songs filled dance floors. His self-described “super heavy funk” gave him No. 1 R&B hits and Top 20 pop hits with “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and “Mother Popcorn” in 1969, “Super Bad Pts. 1 & 2” in 1970, “Hot Pants” and “Make It Funky” in 1971, “Get on the Good Foot Pt. 1” in 1972 and “The Payback Pt. 1” in 1974. He provided soundtracks for blaxploitation movies like “Black Caesar” and “Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off,” and performed at the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.

The rise of disco — a much simplified version of Mr. Brown’s funk — knocked him out of the Top 40 in the late 1970s. But an appearance in “The Blues Brothers” in 1980 started a career resurgence, and in 1985 Mr. Brown had a pop hit, peaking at No. 4, with “Living in America,” the song he performed in the movie “Rocky IV.” It won him his second Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording. That year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of its first members.

Meanwhile hip-hop had arrived, with Mr. Brown’s music often providing the beat. LL Cool J, Public Enemy, De La Soul and the Beastie Boys are among the more than 100 acts that have sampled Clyde Stubblefield’s drumming on “Funky Drummer” alone. In 1984 Mr. Brown collaborated with the influential rapper Afrika Bambaataa on the single “Unity.” He kept recording into the 21st century, including a 2002 studio album, “The Next Step.”

Mr. Brown maintained a nearly constant touring schedule despite a tumultuous personal life. During the 1970s the Internal Revenue Service demanded $4.5 million in unpaid taxes; the jet and radio stations were sold. His oldest son, Teddy, died in a car accident in 1973.

In 1988, intoxicated on PCP, he burst into an insurance seminar adjoining his own office in Augusta, then led police on a car chase across the South Carolina border. He was sentenced to prison for carrying a deadly weapon at a public gathering, attempting to flee a police officer and driving under the influence of drugs, and was released in 1991.

In 1998 after discharging a rifle and another car chase, he was sentenced to a 90-day drug rehabilitation program. He was officially pardoned by South Carolina in 2003, but arrested again in 2004 on charges of domestic violence against his fourth wife, Tomi Rae Hynie, a former backup singer. “I would never hurt my wife,” he said in a statement at the time. “I love her very much.”

She survives him, along with their son, James Brown II, and at least five other children.

In 1999, Mr. Brown made a deal to receive more than $25 million in bonds against advance publishing royalties. This year, however, he sought to refinance the bonds with a new loan. The banker who had made the original deal, David Pullman, objected to the terms, and Mr. Brown filed a lawsuit against him in July.

But Mr. Brown’s status as an American archetype had long since been assured. A definitive collection, “Star Time” (Universal), was released in 1991. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2003, the same year that Michael Jackson presented him with a BET Award for lifetime achievement. In a 1990 interview with The New York Times, he said, “I was always 25 years ahead of my time.”

John O’Neil contributed reporting.

Posted by lois at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2006

CA: High Court Will Not Review Ruling on County Strip Search Policy

High Court Will Not Review Ruling on County Strip Search Policy

By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer-November 29, 2006

Staff Writer

A Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding unconstitutional the Ventura County sheriff's policy of subjecting all suspects arrested on drug charges to strip searches with visual body cavity inspection was left standing yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The justices, without comment, left standing the April 20 panel decision in Way v. County of Ventura, 04-55457. The ruling held that the county cannot conduct the intrusive search when a suspect is charged with a misdemeanor offense of being under the influence of drugs, unless there is individualized suspicion that the accused is hiding contraband or the person is going to enter the general jail population.

The court left open the question of whether such searches are permissible when a suspect is booked on other types of drug charges.

Alan Wisotsky, the Oxnard attorney who represented the county, said the case will now return to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California for trial on damages, "or possibly mediation." The ruling will also effect a separate class action brought on behalf of suspects who were subjected to the searches, he said.

The plaintiffs in that action are represented by Ventura attorney Ernest Bell, who also represented Noelle Way, the plaintiff in the action that the Supreme Court declined to hear.

Wisotsky told the MetNews that the policy was changed on an interim basis after District Judge Consuelo Marshall rejected it in 2002. "At this juncture we clearly have to revisit it and make appropriate permanent modifications," he said.

Way was tending bar at the Red Cove Bar in Ventura during the early hours of Sept. 6, 2000 when a Ventura police officer arrested her on suspicion of being under the influence of cocaine or methamphetamine. The officer reported that she had dilated pupils, a rapid pulse rate, a nervous attitude and rapid speech.

The charge was dropped after a blood test proved negative, but not before Way was forced to submit to the body cavity inspection and detained in a holding cell for several hours before posting bail.

Public Safety

The county defended the policy on the basis of public safety needs and Penal Code Sec. 4030(a), which permits strip searches and bodily cavity inspections of misdemeanor suspects held on weapons, drug, or violence charges. But Marshall, who has since taken senior status, held that the policy violated Way's Fourth Amendment rights and that neither Sheriff Bob Brooks nor the female deputy who conducted the search were entitled to qualified immunity.

In rejecting the immunity claim, Marshall reasoned that the defendants should have known, based on prior Ninth Circuit decisions, that the policy would not pass constitutional muster.

The Ninth Circuit panel, in an opinion by Judge Pamela Ann Rymer, agreed that the policy was unconstitutional as applied, but said the individual defendants acted in good faith and were entitled to qualified immunity, since the court had never specifically ruled as to whether the fact that someone was charged with being under the influence of drugs was enough to justify an intrusive search.

No Showing Made

Prior rulings, Rymer explained, have characterized body cavity searches and "frightening and humiliating," even when conducted in a private room by a single deputy. To justify such searches by way of blanket policy, the judge wrote, authorities must show a link between the policy and legitimate security concerns.

In the case of suspects like Way, "who are spontaneously arrested and detained temporarily at the facility for being under the influence," no such showing was made, Rymer said. While Wisotsky asserted at oral argument that there had been problems at the facility since the interim policy was instituted in response to Marshall's ruling, there was nothing in the record to show what the problems were, the appellate jurist wrote.

"In effect, they ask us to take security implications on faith," Rymer wrote.

District Judge Edward J. Reed Jr. of Nevada, sitting by designation, concurred in Rymer's opinion. Judge Kim Wardlaw concurred separately, arguing that the qualified immunity ruling as to the individual defendants was appropriate only because neither the policy nor the statute had been declared unconstitutional prior to the search.

Copyright 2006, Metropolitan News Company
.

Posted by lois at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2006

NY: Michele Maxian, 55, Dies; Won Shorter Lockup Times

November 21, 2006, NY Times
Michele Maxian, 55, Dies; Won Shorter Lockup Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Michele Maxian, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who successfully battled to require New York State courts to arraign a suspect within 24 hours of being arrested, helping to spur reform in the New York City justice system, died last Tuesday in Union City, N.J. She was 55.

The cause was ovarian cancer, the society said. Ms. Maxian lived in Hoboken.

In January 1990, Ms. Maxian began filing petitions against New York City police and correction officials questioning why people were being imprisoned for minor offenses for more than 24 hours without being formally charged. In April 1990, Justice Brenda S. Soloff of State Supreme Court consolidated the 900 petitions Ms. Maxian had filed on one day into a single case.

Ms. Maxian attributed the delays to inefficiency, not malevolence. The city ultimately responded by streamlining procedures.

At the time of the suit, people were typically being kept for 39 or 40 hours while they were being booked and fingerprinted, going through other police procedures and then waiting to appear before a judge to be charged and make a plea. Many of those being held faced minor charges: for example, one person involved in the suit had been arrested for selling umbrellas without a license and then detained for 95 hours.

Justice Soloff ruled that delays of longer than 24 hours were “unnecessary” under a state law requiring expeditious judicial proceedings.

The Legal Aid Society had previously tried but failed to get a federal ruling that any time period longer than 24 hours represented “cruel and unusual punishment” under the United States Constitution. Although the society won a 1987 federal case, the decision was overturned on appeal in 1988, with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holding that 24 hours was “unrealistic” for the crowded New York City court system and instead allowing 72 hours between arrest and arraignment.

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the society’s appeal.

So Ms. Maxian, who had been involved in the first suit, turned to the state courts. She won by convincing Justice Soloff that the city was wasting time at the expense of people who had been arrested but not charged with any crime. She convinced the judge that 24 hours was, indeed, the most reasonable time limit. The judge required the city to justify periods longer than that on an individual basis.

The 1990 decision was based entirely on language in a state law, so broader Constitutional issues did not come into play. It was upheld on appeal to the highest state court.

Ms. Maxian monitored compliance with the ruling and filed grievances when the time limit was exceeded in the mid-1990s. In recent years, with crime down and the criminal justice system less crowded, the city has usually met the 24-hour guideline.

But in 2004, she used the 24-hour guideline as the basis for a suit against the city, charging that it was illegally detaining protesters at the Republican National Convention. She won a settlement in 2005 under which the city paid the arrested people and their lawyers $231,200.

Ms. Maxian graduated from Douglass College and the Rutgers University Law School. She began as a trial lawyer in Legal Aid’s Manhattan office from 1976 to 1982 and was twice director of the special litigation unit, from 1988 to 1998 and from 2002 until her death.

She is survived by her partner of 32 years, Marianne Ardito, and her brother, Richard Maxian, who lives in Georgia.

Another of her legal victories was persuading courts, including the highest one in New York State in 1988, to strike down a ban on loitering in subway, train or bus stations. She persuaded judges that police questioning of apparent loiterers violated their right to remain silent.

“Police are still going to be able to arrest people for doing crimes, but they can’t just arrest people for being suspicious,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Posted by lois at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2006

Hilda Bernstein, 91, Author and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies

Correction from Keith Bernstein (9-27-06)
The blog on my mother Hilda contains two innacuracies;
Hilda Bernstein did not die of heart failure - an artery in her stomach ruptured.
Keith Bernstein did not inform anybody of her death or make any public statement; the infomration, complete with mistakes, was via AP in South Africa who didnt bother to check before they released.

September 13, 2006, NY Times
Hilda Bernstein, 91, Author and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 12 — Hilda Bernstein, an anti-apartheid activist and author whose husband was tried for treason in South Africa alongside Nelson Mandela, died Friday at her home in Cape Town. She was 91.

The cause was heart failure, her son Keith said.

Ms. Bernstein’s husband, Rusty, and Mr. Mandela were tried along with other anti-apartheid activists in the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Mr. Mandela received a life sentence, while Mr. Bernstein was the only defendant acquitted and freed.

But police harassment made life so difficult for the Bernsteins, a white couple, that they were forced into exile, leaving their children behind. They crossed the border into Botswana on foot — a journey described in Hilda Bernstein’s book “The World That Was Ours.”

In exile, Ms. Bernstein was an active member of the African National Congress and a regular speaker for the Anti-Apartheid Movement organization in Britain and abroad.

The couple eventually settled in Britain, but returned to South Africa after the 1994 democratic elections, which made Mr. Mandela president.

Ms. Bernstein was a founding member of the Federation of South African Women, the first multiracial women’s organization in South Africa. She was also an artist, and her work has been used as book jackets and illustrations, posters and cards for the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Ms. Bernstein was born in London in 1915 and emigrated to South Africa in 1932, working in advertising, publishing and journalism.

A fiery orator, she served as a city councilor in Johannesburg from 1943 to 1946 as the only Communist elected to public office in a “whites only” vote.

She and her husband were active in the early days of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Rusty Bernstein died in 2002.

She is survived by four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Posted by lois at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2006

Victoria Gray Adams: A Founder of the MS Freedom Democratic Party

August 19, 2006
Victoria Gray Adams, Civil Rights Leader, Is Dead at 79
By TIM WEINER

Victoria Jackson Gray Adams, a key figure in the struggle by Mississippi blacks to win their political and civil rights in the 1960’s and the first woman to seek a seat in the United States Senate from her state, died last Saturday in Baltimore. She was 79.

Her death was announced by her son, the Rev. Cecil Conteen Gray of Baltimore.

Forty-two years ago, Mrs. Gray Adams, a teacher, door-to-door saleswoman of Beauty Queen cosmetics and leader of voter education classes from the hamlet of Palmers Crossing, on the edge of Hattiesburg, Miss., decided to take on Senator John C. Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for 16 years.

In July 1964, she announced that she and others from the tiny Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would challenge the power of the segregationist politicians, like Mr. Stennis, who represented her state. The time had come, she said, to pay attention “to the Negro in Mississippi, who had not even had the leavings from the American political table.”

That decision became a turning point for the civil rights movement and for the Democratic Party, which for most of its history had been profoundly influenced by all-white delegations from the South. From Hattiesburg, the waves of the civil rights movement “swept quietly through the church world into politics,” the author Taylor Branch wrote in “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65” (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Mrs. Gray Adams was defeated by a ratio of 30 to 1 in the Democratic primary, in part because Mississippi had effectively disenfranchised black voters. But the party she started and led went on to challenge the right of the all-white Mississippi delegation to represent her state at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

“We had women, men, African-Americans, whites,” Mrs. Gray Adams said of the party in a 2004 interview for the Virginia Organizing Project, a grass-roots political group she helped found. “We were going in the face of the Mississippi Democratic Party, which included some of the most powerful members of the U.S. Congress, to demand that we be recognized to have representation at the Democratic National Convention. It was wild.”

Millions of Americans watching on television saw Fannie Lou Hamer, the best known of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s founders, tell the convention’s credentials committee that she had been jailed and beaten for trying to register blacks to vote. “Is this America?” Ms. Hamer asked.

The all-white Mississippi delegation walked out of the convention. It rejected a compromise proposal to give the integrated Freedom Democratic Party token representation on the floor. It was the beginning of the end of an old political tradition. In 1968, Mississippi seated an integrated delegation at the Democratic convention.

“We really were the true Democratic Party,” Mrs. Gray Adams said in the 2004 interview. In the end, she said, “we accomplished the removal of the wall, the curtain of fear in Mississippi for African-Americans demanding their rights.”

She continued: “We eliminated the isolation of the African-Americans from the political process. I believe that Mississippi now has the highest number of African-American elected officials in the nation. We laid the groundwork for that.”

Born on Nov. 5, 1926, in Palmers Crossing, the daughter of Mack and Annie Mae Ott Jackson, Mrs. Gray Adams was educated at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Jackson State College in Mississippi. She went on to serve as a campus minister at Virginia State University and to teach and lecture at schools, colleges and universities across the nation.

Her first marriage, to Tony Gray, produced three children, Georgie; Tony Jr., who died in 1997; and Cecil, and ended in divorce in 1964. Other survivors include her husband of 40 years, Reuben Earnest Adams Jr.; their son, Reuben III; a brother, Glodies Jackson; and eight grandchildren.

Mrs. Gray Adams said she learned in 1964 that there were two kinds of people in grass-roots politics, “those who are in the movement, and those who have the movement in them.”

“The movement is in me,” she said, “and I know it always will be.”

August 16, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Victoria Gray Adams

PETERSBURG, Va. (AP) -- Victoria Gray Adams, who helped open Freedom Schools that pushed for civil rights in Mississippi in 1964 and became a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, died Saturday at her home in Petersburg, Va., friends said. She was 73.

Adams was a Hattiesburg, Miss. native. Along with Fannie Lou Hamer and others, she attempted to unseat the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegation during the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City, N.J.

While they did not replace the all-white group, the Freedom Democrats brought national attention to Mississippi's racial and political divisions.

In 2004, Adams and others who formed the party were recognized at the Democratic convention in Boston for their trailblazing role.

------

Posted by lois at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2006

Robert L. McCullough, 64, Dies; Civil Rights Innovator

August 11, 2006
Robert L. McCullough, 64, Dies; Civil Rights Innovator
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Robert L. McCullough, who changed the civil rights movement by choosing to work on a roadside chain gang rather than pay a $100 fine after his arrest in 1961 for asking to be served at a whites-only lunch counter in South Carolina, died Monday in Rock Hill, S.C. He was 64.

Samuel Reid Jr., assistant manager of Robinson Funeral Home, confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.

Mr. McCullough was the informal leader of nine black students and a civil rights organizer who on Jan. 31, 1961, sat down at the McCrory’s lunch counter in Rock Hill and ordered hamburgers and drinks. They were refused service and arrested for trespassing.

Nine of the 10 chose 30 days’ hard labor at the York County prison farm rather than pay the fine, as had been the practice of demonstrators.

The Gandhi-like stand by Mr. McCullough’s group, with the slogan “jail, no bail,’’ inspired an immediate change in the tactics of civil rights sit-ins; within days about 100 protesters were jailed in similar cases, winning support for the cause.

The group became known as the Friendship Nine because they were students at Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill. Mr. McCullough is the first of them to die.

Taylor Branch, in his book “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” said the decision to go to jail had been “an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement,” because it used cheerful suffering as political witness in the manner of Gandhi during the struggle for Indian independence.

Mr. Branch said it had also allowed protesters to escape the crippling cumulative cost of bail and fines.

“The obvious advantage of ‘jail, no bail’ was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the authorities to pay for jail space and food,” Mr. Branch wrote.

Within a week of the jailing, four professional civil rights organizers went to Rock Hill to seek arrest and joined them in the York County jail; 31 protesters were in an Atlanta jail and six were jailed in Lynchburg, Va.

Despite news reports of the prisoners’ brave singing of hymns and patriotic songs, incarceration was exceedingly unpleasant. Claude Sitton, a reporter for The New York Times who visited the York County jail, said disinfectant fumes burned the eyes and ruined the taste of a cigarette. Inmates slept on the steel latticework of the bunks because “drunks set them on fire,” he reported. Some of the Friendship Nine were consigned to solitary confinement and lived on bread and water.

In an article about the release of eight of the prisoners (the ninth was released pending appeal), The Times quoted Mr. McCullough as saying that the experience “served to strengthen my conviction that human suffering can assist social change.”

Robert Louis McCullough was born on March 16, 1942, in Rock Hill, a textile manufacturing center near Charlotte, N.C. He attended the all-black Emmett Scott High School, and then Friendship, which no longer exists. The civil rights struggle had occupied Rock Hill since 1957, when a boycott of the local segregated bus company forced it out of business.

Sit-ins against segregated lunch counters began on Feb. 1, 1960, in Greensboro, N.C., with students continuing the protests there for six months. Similar demonstrations had occurred in at least 16 other cities over the three preceding years but the Greensboro demonstration elicited the support of hundreds as the days went on. Sit-ins spread to Durham and Winston, N.C., and many other cities, including Rock Hill.

At Friendship, Mr. McCullough gained the nickname Napoleon in deference to his leadership and diminutive height. In an article Wednesday in The Rock Hill Herald, David Williamson, one of the nine, called Mr. McCullough “our general.”

Mr. Williamson said, “He used to throw his weight around, but he was the smallest one in the crowd.”

Thomas Massey, another member of the group, told The Herald that he had initially balked at the lunch-counter protest because he had money and “didn’t have to sit on that white stool in that white dime store.”

Mr. McCullough had replied, using his friend’s nickname: “It’s not just about you, Dub. This is for all of humanity.”

The sit-in in Rock Hill, was different from its predecessors in that protesters gathered with the explicit intention of going to jail: some brought their toothbrushes.

Mr. McCullough is survived by his wife, the former Mary Patricia Williams; his daughter, Tracy McCullough; four brothers; four sisters; and two grandchildren.

He worked as a computer technician for various companies and was a volunteer firefighter. He attended reunions of the protesters, at which they joked that the chain gang was the first day of hard work some had ever done, according to an article in The Herald in 2001.

“I guess if we had to do it today, Scoop,” Mr. McCullough declared, calling Mr. Williamson by his nickname, ‘‘we’d do it again.’’

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2006

Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, Kibbutz Founder, Dies at 99

June 19, 2006

By DENNIS HEVESI

Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, a pioneer of the Israeli kibbutz movement, a contentious colleague of the nation's leaders and the leader of its labor federation in the early 1970's, died on May 19. He was 99.

Often describing himself as a radical Socialist, Mr. Ben-Aharon took controversial positions that rattled even his allies among the left-leaning founders of the nation he helped create. He said that the country had room "for the Arab masses" and that Jerusalem must be shared with Muslims and Christians. He said that Israelis had become too concerned with becoming rich and that the nation was being built on the backs of Arab workers. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in a position presaging current government policy, he called for unilateral withdrawal from some occupied territories.

Born Yitzhak Nussboim on July 17, 1906, in Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now part of Romania, Mr. Ben-Aharon joined several Zionist organizations as a teenager, then walked or rode a donkey overland to Palestine in 1928. There he helped found Kibbutz Givat Haim, a Jewish farm commune between Tel Aviv and Haifa, where he remained the rest of his life.

From 1932 to 1938 he was secretary of the Tel Aviv Workers' Council and for two years was secretary of Mapai, a forerunner of Israel's Labor Party.

In 1940, Mr. Ben-Aharon volunteered for the Jewish Brigade, part of the British Army, rising to the rank of major. While fighting in Greece in 1941, he was captured by the Germans and spent the next four years in a prisoner of war camp.

From 1949 to 1965 he was elected to five terms as a member of Parliament and was Israel's transportation minister in the last two of those terms. From 1969 to 1977 he served two more terms in Parliament.

From 1969 to 1973 Mr. Ben-Aharon was also secretary general of the labor federation Histadrut, often stirring controversy. He allowed Arabs to join the federation for the first time. He criticized Prime Minister Golda Meir for being too close to capitalists.

During a period of national soul-searching over the founding principles of Israeli society, Mr. Ben-Aharon, a booming orator, gave a speech in April 1972, saying the nation had lost its way in a "frenzied rat race" for personal enrichment. "We have started to worship achievement as a golden calf," he said.

Then, in a 1973 Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, Mr. Ben-Aharon wrote that "an Arab minority has become part and parcel of the reality of this land." And, he said, "there is plenty of room both for the Jewish people returning here and for the Arab masses — this is a formula we can live with."

Later that year, Mr. Ben-Aharon received withering criticism from the press and even from members of his own faction of the Labor Party when he called for Israel to withdraw unilaterally from some West Bank territories occupied since the 1967 war, because it would reduce antagonism toward Israel and help turn Palestinians into friendly neighbors. In 1995, the Israeli government awarded Mr. Ben-Aharon its highest honor, the Israel Prize.

Mr. Ben-Aharon is survived by his second wife, Bilha Rubin, and two sons, Yariv and Yishayahu. His first wife, Miriam, died in 1993.

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May 23, 2006

An Appreciation: How Katherine Dunham Revealed Black Dance to the World

May 23, 2006

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Whatever else Katherine Dunham was in her long and productive life, which ended on Sunday at 96, she was a radiantly beautiful woman whose warmth and sense of self spread like honey on the paths before her.

How could anyone be stopped by the color of her skin after her invincibly lush sensuality and witty intelligence had seduced audiences on Broadway, in Hollywood films and in immensely popular dance shows that toured the world? And how could anyone cram black American dance into one or two conveniently narrow categories — or for that matter ignore the good strong roots that would one day grow green stems and leaves — with the vision of her company's lavishly theatrical African and Caribbean dance revues in mind?

Miss Dunham was one of the first American artists to focus on black dance and dancers as prime material for the stage. She burst into public consciousness in the 1940's, at a time when opportunities were increasing for black performers in mainstream theater and film, at least temporarily. But there was little middle ground there between the exotic and the demeaning everyday stereotypes.

Ms. Dunham's dance productions were certainly exotic, and sometimes fell into uncomfortable clichés. But a 1987 look at her work, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's "Magic of Katherine Dunham" program, confirmed that she also evoked ordinary lives that were lived with ordinary dignity.

Miss Dunham, as she was universally known, was by no means the only dance artist to push for the recognition of black dance in the 1940's, when Pearl Primus pushed, too, though a great deal less glamorously. But though Miss Dunham's academic credentials as an anthropologist were impeccable, including a doctorate from the University of Chicago, it was her gift for seduction that helped most to pave the way for choreographers like Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty and Alvin Ailey, who were the first wave of what is today an established and influential part of the larger world of American modern dance.

Ailey's first encounter with her, as a newly stage-struck boy in his mid-teens, says a great deal about Miss Dunham's appeal. Intrigued by handbills advertising her 1943 "Tropical Revue," he ventured into the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles, his hometown, where it was playing. There he was plunged into a world of color, light and heat that was populated by highly trained dancers with a gift for powerful immediacy, who were dressed in subtle, stylish costumes designed by John Pratt, Miss Dunham's husband. After the show, Ailey followed the crowd making its way backstage to her dressing room and was again stunned when the door opened on a vision of beautiful hanging fabrics and carpeting, paintings, books, flowers and baskets of fruit. And there was La Dunham, dressed in vividly colored silks and exuding irresistible gaiety and warmth.

Ailey returned to the show several times a week, let into the theater by the Dunham dancers who had looked so unapproachably exotic on that first backstage visit. And he was still more than a little in love with her when he invited her to create for his company "The Magic of Katherine Dunham," a program of pieces that had not been seen for a quarter-century. Miss Dunham's dancers, who remained close to her and to one another throughout her life, swarmed into the studios to help her work with the young performers.

Most of the Ailey dancers did not appreciate Miss Dunham's iron perfectionism or the unusual demands of her technique, a potent but challenging blend of Afro-Caribbean, ballet and modern dance. And she was not the easiest of women. I remember speaking with her before a public interview we were to do in April 1993. Addicted to CNN, she had just learned of the fiery, tragic end to the F.B.I.'s seige of the Branch Davidian compound in in Waco, Tex., that morning, and that was all that she could talk about, off and on the stage, despite her promises to discuss her work.

Her horror was real, as was her sense of social justice. She has been criticized for not denouncing the Duvaliers for their dictatorship in Haiti, where she owned a home. But she had also sponsored a medical clinic in Port-au-Prince, and she stayed on for many years in desolate, impoverished East St. Louis, Ill., where she established a museum of artifacts pertaining to her career and taught local children including Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic long jumper, and the filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin.

"I was trying to steer them into something more constructive than genocide," she said of the children in a 1991 interview with me in The New York Times. "Everyone needs, if not a culture hero, a culturally heroic society. There is nothing stronger in a man than the need to grow."

That idealistic, eloquent self was infused with a streak of no-nonsense practicality.

"I don't like that 'accept,' " MissDunham, still a vibrant beauty at 91, said during a Times interview six years ago in response to a middle-aged visitor who insisted on talking to her about the acceptance and embrace of old age. "I would just let the whole thing go. Just be there for it, centimeter by centimeter." Then it was time for the photo session.

Her eyes seemed to widen even more invitingly and her gaze to grow even warmer as she looked into the eye of the camera and asked, "Did you ever see photographs of elderly divas trying to look sexy?"

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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May 01, 2006

John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society

April 30, 2006

By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and DOUGLAS MARTIN

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment he often needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died Saturday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

Mr. Galbraith lived in Cambridge and at an "unfarmed farm" near Newfane, Vt. His death was confirmed by his son J. Alan Galbraith.

Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was "The Affluent Society" (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases — among them "the affluent society," "conventional wisdom" and "countervailing power" — became part of the language.

An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, Mr. Galbraith was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken. Mr. Galbraith clearly preferred taking issue with the conventional wisdom he distrusted.

He strived to change the very texture of the national conversation about power and its nature in the modern world by explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded market mechanisms. His sweeping ideas, which might have gained even greater traction had he developed disciples willing and able to prove them with mathematical models, came to strike some as almost quaint in today's harsh, interconnected world where corporations devour one another for breakfast.

"The distinctiveness of his contribution appears to be slipping from view," Stephen P. Dunn wrote in The Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics in 2002.

Mr. Galbraith, a revered lecturer for generations of Harvard students, nonetheless always commanded attention.

Robert Lekachman, a liberal economist who shared many of Mr. Galbraith's views on an affluent society they both thought not generous enough to its poor nor sufficiently attendant to its public needs, once described the quality of his discourse as "witty, supple, eloquent, and edged with that sheen of malice which the fallen sons of Adam always find attractive when it is directed at targets other than themselves."

From the 1930's to the 1990's Mr. Galbraith helped define the terms of the national political debate, influencing both the direction of the Democratic Party and the thinking of its leaders.

He tutored Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, on Keynesian economics. He advised President John F. Kennedy (often over lobster stew at the Locke-Ober restaurant in their beloved Boston) and served as his ambassador to India.

Though he eventually broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson over the war in Vietnam, he helped conceive of Mr. Johnson's Great Society program and wrote a major presidential address that outlined its purposes. In 1968, pursuing his opposition to the war, he helped Senator Eugene J. McCarthy seek the Democratic nomination for president.

In the course of his long career, he undertook a number of government assignments, including the organization of price controls in World War II and speechwriting for Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson.

He drew on his experiences in government to write three satirical novels. One in 1968, "The Triumph," a best seller, was an assault on the State Department's slapstick efforts to assist a mythical banana republic, Puerto Santos. In 1990, he took on the Harvard economics department with "A Tenured Professor," ridiculing, among others, a certain outspoken character who bore no small resemblance to himself.

At his death, Mr. Galbraith was the Paul M. Warburg emeritus professor of economics at Harvard, where he had taught for most of his career. A popular lecturer, he treated economics as an aspect of society and culture rather than as an arcane discipline of numbers.

A Polarizing Figure

Mr. Galbraith was admired, envied and sometimes scorned for his eloquence and wit and his ability to make complicated, dry issues understandable to any educated reader. He enjoyed his international reputation as a slayer of sacred cows and a maverick among economists whose pronouncements became known as "classic Galbraithian heresies."

But other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not generally share his views on production and consumption, and he was not regarded by his peers as among the top-ranked theorists and scholars. Such criticism did not sit well with Mr. Galbraith, a man no one ever called modest, and he would respond that his critics had rightly recognized that his ideas were "deeply subversive of the established orthodoxy."

"As a matter of vested interest, if not of truth," he added, "they were compelled to resist."

Nearly 40 years after writing "The Affluent Society," Mr. Galbraith updated it in 1996 as "The Good Society." In it, he said his earlier concerns had only worsened: that if anything, America had become even more a "democracy of the fortunate."

Mr. Galbraith gave broad thought to how America changed from a nation of small farms and workshops to one of big factories and superstores, and judgments of this legacy are as broad as his ambition. Beginning with "American Capitalism" in 1952, he laid out a detailed critique of what he saw as an increasingly oligopolistic economy. Combined with works in the 1950's by writers like David Reisman, Vance Packard and William H. Whyte, the book changed people's views of the postwar world.

Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never dreamed they needed.

Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.

Some suggested that Mr. Galbraith's liberalism crippled his influence. In a review of "John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics" by Richard Parker (Farrar, 2005), J. Bradford DeLong wrote in Foreign Affairs that Mr. Galbraith's lifelong sermon of social democracy was destined to fail in a land of "rugged individualism." He compared Mr. Galbraith to Sisyphus, endlessly pushing the same rock up a hill that always turns out to be too steep.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that Mr. Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Parker's book recounts, Mr. Sen said the influence of "The Affluent Society," was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted.

"It's like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it's full of quotations," he said.

Born on a Farm

John Kenneth Galbraith was born Oct. 15, 1908, on a 150-acre farm in Dunwich Township in southern Ontario, Canada, the only son of William Archibald and Catherine Kendall Galbraith. His forebears had left Scotland years before.

His father was a farmer and schoolteacher, the head of a farm-cooperative insurance company, an organizer of the township telephone company, and a town and county auditor. His mother, whom he described as beautiful and decidedly firm, died when he was 14.

Mr. Galbraith said he inherited his liberalism, his interest in politics and his wit from his father. When he was about 8, he once recalled, he would join his father at political rallies. At one event, he wrote in his 1964 memoir "The Scotch," his father mounted a large pile of manure to address the crowd.

"He apologized with ill-concealed sincerity for speaking from the Tory platform," Mr. Galbraith related. "The effect on this agrarian audience was electric. Afterward I congratulated him on the brilliance of the sally. He said, 'It was good but it didn't change any votes.' "

At age 18 he enrolled at Ontario Agricultural College, where he took practical farming courses like poultry husbandry and basic plumbing. But as the Depression dragged down Canadian farmers, the questions of how farm products were sold and at what prices became more urgent to him than how they were produced. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a master's degree in 1933 and a doctorate in agricultural economics in 1934.

A major influence on him was the caustic social commentary he found in Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class." Mr. Galbraith called Veblen one of American history's most astute social scientists, but also acknowledged that he tended to be overcritical.

"I've thought to resist this tendency," Mr. Galbraith said, "but in other respects Veblen's influence on me has lasted long. One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read."

While at Berkeley, he began contributing to The Journal of Farm Economics and other publications. His writings came to the attention of Harvard, where he became an instructor and tutor from 1934 to 1939.

In those years the theories of John Maynard Keynes were exciting economists everywhere because they promised solutions to the most urgent problems of the time: the Depression and unemployment. The government must intervene in moments of crisis, Keynes maintained, and unbalance the budget if necessary to get the nation's economic machinery running again.

Keynesianism gave economic validation to what President Roosevelt was doing, Mr. Galbraith thought, and he resolved in 1937 "to go to the temple" — Cambridge University — on a fellowship grant for a year of study with the disciples of Keynes.

In 1937 Mr. Galbraith married Catherine Merriam Atwater, the daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, whom he met when she was a graduate student at Radcliffe.

In addition to his wife and his son J. Alan, of Washington, a lawyer, he is survived by Peter, a former United States ambassador to Croatia and a senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in Washington, and James, an economist at the University of Texas; a sister, Catherine Denholm of Toronto; and six grandchildren.

The War Years

Mr. Galbraith became an American citizen, and taught economics at Princeton in 1939. But after the fall of France in 1940, Mr. Galbraith joined the Roosevelt administration to help manage an economy being prepared for war. He rose to become the administrator of wage and price controls in the Office of Price Administration. Prices remained stable, unlike in earlier wars, but he grew controversial, drawing the constant fire of industry complaints. "I reached the point that all price fixers reach," he said, "My enemies outnumbered my friends."

He was forced to resign in 1943 and was rejected by the Army as too tall when he sought to enlist. He then held a variety of government and private jobs, including director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, director of the Office of Economic Security Policy in the State Department in 1946 and a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, from 1943 to 1948. It was at Fortune, he said, that he became addicted to writing.

In 1949 he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics; his lectures were delivered before standing-room-only audiences. And he began to write with intensity.

He completed two books in 1952, "American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power" and "A Theory of Price Control." In "American Capitalism," he set out to debunk myths about the free market economy and explore concentrations of economic power. He described the pressures that corporations and unions exerted on each other for increased profits and increased wages, and said these countervailing forces kept those giant groups in equilibrium and the nation's economy prosperous and stable.

In his 1981 memoirs, he said that though the basic idea was still sound, he had been "a bit carried away" by his notion of countervailing power. "I made it far more inevitable and rather more equalizing than, in practice, it ever is," he wrote.

He summarized the lessons of his days at the Office of Price Administration in "A Theory of Price Control," later calling it the best book he ever wrote. He said: "The only difficulty is that five people read it. Maybe 10. I made up my mind that I would never again place myself at the mercy of the technical economists who had the enormous power to ignore what I had written. I set out to involve a larger community."

He wrote two more major books in the 1950's dealing with economics, both aimed at a large general audience. Both were best sellers.

In "The Great Crash 1929," he recalled the mistakes of an earlier day and suggested that some were being repeated as the book appeared, in 1955. Mr. Galbraith testified at a Senate hearing and said that another crash was inevitable. The stock market dropped sharply that day, and he was widely blamed.

"The Affluent Society" appeared in 1958, making Mr. Galbraith known around the world. In it, he depicted a consumer culture gone wild, rich in goods but poor in the social services that make for community. He argued that America had become so obsessed with overproducing consumer goods that it had increased the perils of both inflation and recession by creating an artificial demand for frivolous or useless products, by encouraging overextension of consumer credit and by emphasizing the private sector at the expense of the public sector.

Anticipating the environmental movement by nearly a decade, he asked, "Is the added production or the added efficiency in production worth its effect on ambient air, water and space — the countryside?"" Mr. Galbraith called for a change in values that would shun the seductions of advertising and champion clean air, good housing and aid for the arts.

Later, in "The New Industrial State" (1967), he tried to trace the shift of power from the landed aristocracy through the great industrialists to the technical and managerial experts of modern corporations. He called for a new class of intellectuals and professionals to determine policy. While critics, as usual, praised his ability to write compellingly, they also continued to complain that he oversimplified economic matters and either ignored or failed to keep up with corporate changes.

One of his early readers was Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, who twice ran unsuccessfully for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mr. Galbraith often wrote to Mr. Stevenson, introducing him to Keynesian taxation and unemployment policies. In 1953, Mr. Galbraith and Thomas K. Finletter, the former secretary of the Air Force and later ambassador to NATO, formed a sort of brain trust for Mr. Stevenson that included Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the foreign policy specialist George W. Ball.

Although Mr. Galbraith did not at first regard Kennedy, a former student of his at Harvard, as a serious member of Congress, he began to change his view when Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952 and began calling him for advice. The senator's conversations became increasingly wide-ranging and well informed, Mr. Galbraith said, and his respect and affection grew.

After Mr. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he appointed Mr. Galbraith as United States ambassador to India. There were those, Mr. Galbraith among them, who believed that the president had done this to get a potential loose cannon out of Washington.

He said in his memoirs: "Kennedy, I always believed, was pleased to have me in his administration, but at a suitable distance such as in India." Mr. Galbraith was fascinated with India; he had spent a year there in 1956 advising its government and was eager to return.

He spent 27 months as ambassador, clashed with the State Department and was more favorably regarded as a diplomat by those outside the government. He fought for increased American military and economic aid for India and acted as a sort of informal adviser to the Indian government on economic policy. Known by his staff as the Great Mogul, he achieved an excellent rapport with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other senior officials in the Indian government.

When India became embroiled in a border war with China in the Himalayas in 1962, Ambassador Galbraith effectively took charge of both the American military and diplomatic response during what was a brief but potentially explosive crisis. He saw to it that India received restrained American help and took it on himself to announce that the United States recognized India's disputed northern borders.

The reason he had so much control over the American response, he said, was that the border fighting occurred during the far more consequential Cuban missile crisis, and no one at the highest levels at the White House, State Department or Pentagon was readily responding to his cables.

In 1968, Mr. Galbraith published "Indian Painting: The Scenes, Themes and Legends," which he wrote with Mohinder Singh Randhawa. An avid champion of Indian art, he donated much of his collection to the Harvard University Art Museums.

Falling Out With Johnson

After Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Galbraith served as an adviser to President Johnson, meeting with him often at the White House or on trips to the president's ranch in Texas to talk about what could be accomplished with the Great Society programs. Mr. Galbraith said that Johnson had summoned him to write the final draft of his speech outlining the purposes of the Great Society, and that when the writing was done, said, "I'm not going to change a word. That's great."

The relationship between the two men soon broke apart over their differences over the war in Vietnam. Nevertheless, when Adlai Stevenson died in 1965, the ambassadorship to the United Nations became vacant, and word reached Mr. Galbraith that the president was considering him as Mr. Stevenson's successor.

Not wanting to be placed in the position of having to defend administration positions he was strongly against, Mr. Galbraith suggested Justice Arthur J. Goldberg of the Supreme Court. The president named Mr. Goldberg, and Mr. Galbraith later blamed himself for a mistake that "cost the court a good and liberal jurist." Others said he took too much credit for what happened.

In 1973 he published "Economics and the Public Purpose," in which he sought to extend the planning system already used by the industrial core of the economy to the market economy, to small-business owners and to entrepreneurs. Mr. Galbraith called for a "new socialism," with more steeply progressive taxes; public support of the arts; public ownership of housing, medical and transportation facilities; and the conversion of some corporations and military contractors into public corporations.

He continued to pour out magazine articles, book reviews, op-ed essays and letters to editors; he lectured everywhere, sometimes debating William F. Buckley Jr., his friend and Gstaad skiing partner.

In 1977 he wrote and narrated "The Age of Uncertainty," a 13-part television series surveying 200 years of economic theory and practice. In 1990 he wrote "A Tenured Professor," about a Harvard professor who devised a computer-assisted system for playing the stock market and used his billions in profits on programs for education and peace — only to be investigated by Congress for un-American activities and forced to shut down his operations.

In 1996, as Mr. Galbraith approached his 90th year, he wrote "The Good Society." He contended that Republicans out to roll back the welfare state made a fundamental error in thinking that politicians and their actions drive history. Liberals did not create big government; history did, he argued.

Mr. Galbraith, who received the Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 2000, continued to make his views known. Some were surprising, like his speech in 1999 praising Johnson's presidency, which he had helped to bring down by working with the 1968 McCarthy campaign.

In 2004, Mr. Galbraith, who was then 95, published "The Economics of Innocent Fraud," a short book that questioned much of standard economic wisdom.

He remained optimistic about the ability of government to improve the lot of the less fortunate. "Let there be a coalition of the concerned," he urged. "The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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April 29, 2006

Florence L. Mars, 83, Who Was Spurned for Rights Work, Dies

April 29, 2006
By NADINE BROZAN

Florence Latimer Mars, who defied the society into which she was born to write a searing book about the effects of the 1964 killings of the civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Earl Chaney on her hometown, Philadelphia, Miss., died on Sunday at her home there. She was 83.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Dawn Lea Chalmers, a second cousin. She had been suffering from Bell's palsy and diabetes. An only child who never married, Miss Mars had no immediate survivors.

The author of "Witness in Philadelphia," published in 1977 by the Louisiana State University Press, she repeatedly spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan and other forces oppressing the black population of east central Mississippi. A fourth-generation resident of the area and a member of its landed gentry, she was also a significant source of information for the F.B.I. agents investigating the killings, and she testified before a federal grand jury.

Miss Mars paid dearly for her efforts. The Klan organized a boycott against the stockyard where she sold cattle, forcing it to close, and she was compelled to resign from posts at the First United Methodist Church.

"Less than 24 hours after I testified before a grand jury investigating those murders (and the church burning that preceded them), the Klan initiated a campaign to 'ruin' me, a WASP lady with eight great-grandparents buried in Neshoba County," she wrote in her book, completed with the assistance of Lynn Eden, now the associate director for research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Stanley Dearman, who was editor of The Neshoba Democrat from 1966 to 2000, said: "There was a lot of animosity toward her for being so outspoken. She had threats against her life, anonymous midnight phone calls, and people driving by her house throwing bricks and shouting obscenities. But she had a lot of moral courage and conviction and was not shakable."

In his foreword to her book, Turner Catledge, a former executive editor of The New York Times, who grew up in Philadelphia, wrote of her: "What a witness! She witnessed with her eyes, her ears and her heart. She saw, she heard, she felt and through her own involvement she bore witness to qualities of courage and goodwill that all but evaporated in the climate of passion that flowed from an unreasoning fear of change."

Florence Mars, a diminutive woman barely five feet tall, seemed an unlikely candidate for the defiant role she assumed. She was born on Jan. 1, 1923, to Adam Longino Mars, a lawyer, and Emily Geneva Johnson Mars, known as Neva.

She graduated from Philadelphia High School and attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. She graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1944, and then worked as a reservations agent for Delta Air Lines in Atlanta. In the 1950's, she lived in New Orleans, where she photographed jazz musicians. In 1962, she returned to Philadelphia, raising cattle and owning and running the Neshoba County Stockyards.

She also stepped into the forefront of the battle for civil rights in her town. She allied herself with the Council of Federated Organizations, a consortium of groups like S.N.C.C., CORE and the N.A.A.C.P.

One of her more frightening encounters with the Klan occurred late one night in July 1965 when she was driving home from a party at the Neshoba County fair and was picked up by the sheriff, Lawrence A. Rainey, on trumped-up charges of drunken driving. He dragged her out of her car and jailed her. A member of the Klan, Mr. Rainey was later tried on charges of violating the civil rights of the three young civil rights workers killed outside Philadelphia, and was acquitted.

In June 2005, Miss Mars was in the courtroom in Philadelphia when Edgar Ray Killen, by then 80, mastermind of the ambush of the civil rights workers, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison. (The verdict is being appealed.)

Miss Mars was vindicated not only by her friends but also by her foes. At her funeral service on Thursday, Mr. Dearman said, "People said, 'Florence was right.' People who don't remember how they acted."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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April 26, 2006

Jane Jacobs, Social Critic Who Redefined and Championed Cities, Is Dead at 89

April 26, 2006

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Jane Jacobs, the writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet of her own Greenwich Village street and came up with a book that challenged and changed the way people view cities, died yesterday in Toronto, where she moved in 1968. She was 89.

She died at a Toronto hospital, said a distant cousin, Lucia Jacobs, who gave no specific cause of death.

In her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities.

At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a joyous urban jumble.

Her critique of the nation's cities is often grouped with the work of writers who in the 1960's shook the foundations of American society: Paul Goodman's attack on schooling; Michael Harrington's stark portrait of poverty; Ralph Nader's barrage against the auto industry; and Malcolm X's grim tour of America's racial divide, among others. And it continues to influence a third generation of students.

"Death and Life" made four basic recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition and use. 4. Population must be dense.

Ms. Jacobs's thesis was enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street, near 11th Street.

In that description, she puts out her garbage, children go to school, the dry cleaner and the barber open their shops, women come out to chat, longshoremen visit the local bar, teenagers return from school and change to go out on dates, and another day is played out. Sometimes, odd things happen: a bagpiper shows up on a February night, and delighted listeners gather around. Whether neighbors or strangers, people are safer because they are almost never alone.

"People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is," Ms. Jacobs wrote. "I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads, like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses."

Robert Caro, the historian, said in an interview yesterday that Ms. Jacobs was far from the first urban theorist to stress the importance of neighborhood and community. "But no one had ever said it so brilliantly before," he said. "She gave voice to something that needed a voice."

Some critics used adjectives like "triumphant" and "seminal" to describe "Death and Life." Others, not a few of whom with an ax to grind, were less kind. Lewis Mumford, the critic and social historian whom Ms. Jacobs eviscerated in the book, suggested in a review in The New Yorker that she had displayed "aesthetic philistinism with a vengeance."

The battles she ignited are still being fought, and the criticism was perhaps inevitable, given that such an ambitious work was produced by somebody who had not finished college, much less become an established professional in the field.

Indisputably, the book was as radically challenging to conventional thinking as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which helped engender the environmental movement, would be the next year, and Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," which deeply affected perceptions of relations between the sexes, would be in 1963.

Like those two writers, Ms. Jacobs was able to summon a freshness of perspective. Some dismissed it as amateurism, but to many others it was a point of view that made new ideas not only thinkable but suddenly and eminently reasonable.

"When an entire field is headed in the wrong direction, when the routine application of mainstream thinking has produced disastrous results as I think was true of planning and urban policy in the 1950's, then it probably took someone from outside to point out the obvious," Alan Ehrenhalt wrote in 2001 in Planning, the magazine of the American Planning Association.

"That is what Jane Jacobs did 40 years ago," he said.

Action, Not Just Words

Ms. Jacobs did not limit her impact to words. In 1961, she and other protestors were removed from a City Planning Commission hearing on an urban renewal plan for Greenwich Village that they opposed, after they leapt from their seats and rushed the podium.

In 1968, she was arrested on riot and criminal mischief charges for disrupting a public meeting on the construction of an expressway that would have sliced across Lower Manhattan and displaced hundreds of families and businesses. The police said she had tried to tear up the stenographer's transcript tape.

The battle against that highway pitted Ms. Jacobs in an uphill fight against Robert Moses, the autocratic and immensely powerful master builder of that era. The expressway's opponents won.

Ms. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition to the Vietnam War and to shield her two draft-age sons from military duty, and quickly enlisted in Toronto's urban battles. No sooner had she arrived than she led a battle to stop a freeway there.

She became a beloved intellectual pioneer characterized by a dumpling face, an impish smile, sneakers, bangs and owlish glasses. But Roger Starr, a former New York City housing administrator and sometime opponent of Ms. Jacobs, keenly noted the steel just beneath her folksiness.

"What a dear, sweet character she isn't," he said.

After she was removed from the Planning Commission hearing in 1961, her own words underlined her feistiness. "We had been ladies and gentlemen and only got pushed around," she said.

But fighting with government, even being arrested with Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg in an antidraft protest, was something she said she had repeatedly been forced into by "outrageous" governmental actions.

What she hated most about those actions was that they took time away from her writing, which she said was her way of thinking. And in at least five fields of inquiry, she thought deeply and innovatively: urban design, urban history, regional economics, the morality of the economy and the nature of economic growth.

Each of her major books led naturally to the next. From writing about how people functioned within cities, she analyzed how cities function within nations, how nations function with one another, how everyone functions in a world of conflicting moral principles and, finally, how economies grow like biological organisms.

A small book in 1980 arguing for Quebec separatism created a stir in Canada, while a 1996 memoir of her great-aunt's experience as a schoolteacher in rural Alaska, which she edited, impressed reviewers with its homespun wisdom.

But it is "Death and Life," published by Random House, that rocked the planning and architectural establishment.

On one level, it represented the first liberal attack on the liberal idea of urban renewal. At the same time, the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson saw an old-fashioned vision of community that he compared to Thornton Wilder's fictional Grover's Corners. Ms. Jacobs herself thought the book's continuing appeal was that it plumbed the depths of human nature like a good novel.

In 2003, Herbert Muschamp, the Times's chief architecture critic, wrote that Ms. Jacobs's book was "one of 20th-century architecture's most traumatic events," in part because Ms. Jacobs was dismissive about the importance of design.

In recent years, she became an inspiration to architects and planners who espouse what they call the New Urbanism, an effort to promote social interaction by incorporating such Jacobean features as ground-floor stores in suburban developments.

Patrick Pinnell, an architect associated with this school, said "Death and Life" represented almost the last expression of optimism about American cities. As early as 1974, John E. Zuccotti, then chairman of the New York City Planning Commission, called Ms. Jacobs a prophet and himself a "neo-Jacobean" when he announced a smaller-scale, more sensitive urban planning approach. Ms. Jacobs was born Jane Butzner on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pa. Her father was a physician and her mother a schoolteacher. She remembered being something of a troublemaker in school, engaging in pranks like exploding inflated paper bags in the lunchroom. She preferred reading books surreptitiously to listening to the teacher.

In an interview in Azure magazine in 1997, Ms. Jacobs recounted her habit of carrying on imaginary conversations with Thomas Jefferson while running errands. When she could think of nothing more to tell Jefferson, she replaced him with Benjamin Franklin.

"Like Jefferson, he was interested in lofty things, but also in nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details," she said, "such as why the alley we were walking through wasn't paved, and who would pave it if it were paved. He was interested in everything, so he was a very satisfying companion."

Years later, she realized that she had developed her talent of working through difficult ideas in simple terms by practicing them on her imaginary Franklin. She also acquired another inner companion through Alfred Duggan, an English historical novelist. He was Cerdic, a Saxon chieftain. Years later, she continued to chat with him while doing housework.

"There were only two things in the entire house that were familiar to him," she wrote; "the fire (although he didn't understand the chimney) and the sword," a Civil War souvenir. "Everything else had to be explained to him."

Not wanting to go to college, she took an unpaid position as assistant to the women's editor at The Scranton Tribune. In 1934, she moved to New York to join her sister, who was six years older and had a job in the home furnishings department of Abraham & Straus, the Brooklyn department store. The sisters lived on the top floor of a six-story walkup in Brooklyn Heights.

Subways Lead to Jobs

Each day, Ms. Jacobs got on the subway and arbitrarily chose a stop at which to get off and look for a job. Because she liked the sound of Christopher Street, she got off there and found an apartment in Greenwich Village and soon after, a job as a secretary in a candy manufacturing company.

She worked as a secretary for five years. The sisters did not have much money and sometimes lived on Pablum and bananas, Ms. Jacobs said in an interview with Metropolis Magazine in 2001.

She began writing articles then, first for a metals-trade paper. She sold a series of articles about different areas of the city, like the fur district, to Vogue, earning $40 for each at a time when she was making $12 a week as a secretary. She wrote Sunday features for The New York Herald Tribune and articles for Q Magazine on manhole covers, among other things.

While working full time, she attended Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years and took courses in geology, zoology, law, political science and economics. In 1944, Ms. Jacobs, who was then working for the Office of War Information, and her two roommates had a party in their apartment. One guest was Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., an architect who specialized in hospital design. They met in April and married in May.

Ms. Jacobs told Azure that she would not have written any books without her husband's encouragement. It was he who decided that the family should move to Toronto in 1968 after their sons said they would go to jail rather than serve in Vietnam. Mr. Jacobs died in 1996. Ms. Jacobs is survived by her sons, James, of Toronto, and Ned, of Vancouver; her daughter, Burgin Jacobs, of New Denver, British Columbia, and one granddaughter.

Suspicions Aroused

In 1952, Ms. Jacobs got a job as an editor at Architectural Forum, where she stayed for 10 years. That gave her a perch from which to observe urban renewal projects. On a visit to Philadelphia, she noticed that the streets of a project were deserted while an older, nearby street was crowded.

"So, I got very suspicious of this whole thing," she told The Toronto Star in 1997. "I pointed that out to the designer, but it was absolutely uninteresting to him. How things worked didn't interest him.

"He wasn't concerned about its attractiveness to people. His notion was totally aesthetic, divorced from everything else."

Her doubts increased after William Kirk, the director of the Union Settlement in East Harlem, taught her new ways of seeing neighborhoods. She came to see the prevalent planning notions, which involved bulldozing low-rise housing in poor neighborhoods and replacing it with tall apartment buildings surrounded by open space, as a superstition akin to early 19th-century physicians' belief in bloodletting.

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder," she wrote in "Death and Life," "and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

William H. Whyte, the editor of Fortune magazine and the author of books about urban life as well as his celebrated "Organization Man," asked Ms. Jacobs to write an article for Fortune on urban downtowns in 1958. Her essay, which was reprinted in "The Exploding Metropolis" (Doubleday, 1958), turned out to be a trial run for her book.

"Designing a dream city is easy," she concluded. "Rebuilding a living one takes imagination."

The Fortune article caught the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which offered her a grant in 1958 to write about cities. Two grants and three years later, she produced her manuscript for "Death and Life" on the Remington typewriter that she used until her death.

Her seemingly simple prescriptions for neighborhood diversity, short blocks, dense populations and a mix of buildings represented a major rethinking of modern planning. They were coupled with fierce condemnations of the writings of the planners Sir Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, as well as those of the architect Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, who championed the ideal of graceful towers rising over exquisite open spaces. Mr. Mumford held his fire for a year before replying in a New Yorker article, sardonically titled "Home Remedies for Urban Cancer."

"Like a construction gang bulldozing a site clean of all habitations, good or bad," Mr. Mumford wrote, "she bulldozes out of existence every desirable innovation in urban planning during the last century, and every competing idea, without even a pretense of critical evaluation."

Form Over Substance?

Even the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, while expressing profound admiration for Ms. Jacobs in a New York Times article in 1996, suggested that she may have overstated the importance of the physical form of cities.

"Sometimes big, ugly high-rise towers work just fine," he wrote.

Ms. Jacobs next book, "The Economy of Cities" (Random House, 1969), challenged the ideas that cities were established on a rural economic base; rather, she suggested, rural economies have been built directly through city economies. After that came "The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle for Sovereignty" (Random House, 1980). It argued that Canada and Quebec would be better off without each other, on the general grounds that smaller is better.

She delved more deeply into economics and cities with "Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life" (Random House, 1984), in which she contended that national governments undermine the economy of cities, which she saw as the natural engines of economic growth.

Her "Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics" (Vintage, 1994) looks at the moral underpinnings of work by examining different value systems. "The Nature of Economies" (Modern Library, 2000) likens economic activity to an ecosystem. Her last book, "Dark Age Ahead" (Random House, 2004), argues that North American culture is collapsing, then suggests ways to reverse the trend.

During her last years, Canadians held conferences to honor Ms. Jacobs. For New Yorkers, she lived on in the famous photo of her with a beer and a cigarette in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, as well as memories of her plotting municipal mischief at another Village hangout. To generations of planners, architects and students of cities, Ms. Jacobs remains a seminal influence.

She perhaps perceived herself as an intellectual adventurer ready and able to follow her quixotic, often brilliant instincts into ever more fascinating terrain.

In "Systems of Survival," one of her characters worried that he was not qualified.

"Why not us?" replied the man who had invited the group together. "If more qualified people are up to the same thing, more power to them. But we don't know that, do we?"

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2006

Ellen Kuzwayo; writer fought apartheid

By Alexandra Zavis, Associated Press | April 20, 2006
Boston Globe

JOHANNESBURG -- Ellen Kuzwayo, an author and women's rights and antiapartheid champion, died yesterday after a long illness, her family said. She was 91.

Ms. Kuzwayo was admitted three weeks ago to Soweto's Lesedi Private Clinic, experiencing complications associated with chronic diabetes, her son Bobo told the South African Press Association.

Ms. Kuzwayo was the first black writer to win South Africa's premier CNA Literary Prize for her 1985 autobiography, ''Call Me Woman," a book that made her a spokeswoman for the suffering and triumphs of black women under apartheid.

''My motivation for writing the book was born out of the negative image about black women in South Africa, promoted by the general community of white people of this country, in particular the women . . . who employed African work as domestic workers," Ms. Kuzwayo said.

In 1996, she published a collection of short stories, ''Sit Down and Listen: Stories From South Africa." She also collaborated on films.

Born in rural Free State, Ms. Kuzwayo inherited her family's farm, only to lose it when the area was declared for whites only.

Trained as a teacher and social worker, she moved to the sprawling Johannesburg township of Soweto, where she became an active opponent of the white-minority regime after police gunned down students in 1976 protests against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in black schools. Arrested for her political activities, she spent five months in detention in 1977.

Ms. Kuzwayo was elected to Parliament in South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994, serving five years. She was also active in projects to educate women and improve living conditions in Soweto, becoming an institution in the township, where her advice was sought by schools, church groups, welfare agencies, and others.

Ms. Kuzwayo leaves two sons, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Posted by lois at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2006

Rev. William Sloane Coffin Dies at 81: Fought for Civil Rights and Against War

April 13, 2006, NY Times
Rev. William Sloane Coffin Dies at 81; Fought for Civil Rights and Against a War
By MARC D. CHARNEY
The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., a civil rights and antiwar campaigner who sought to inspire and encourage an idealistic and rebellious generation of college students in the 1960's from his position as chaplain of Yale University, then reveled in the role of lightning rod thrust upon him by officials and conservatives who thought him and his style of dissent dangerous, died yesterday at his home in Strafford, Vt. He was 81.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Amy Coffin. She said he had recently been under hospice care.

Dr. Coffin, a believer in the power of civil disobedience to bring social and political change, was arrested as a Freedom Rider early in the 1960's and was an early admirer of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

An ordained Presbyterian minister, he embraced a philosophy that put social activism at the heart of his clerical duties. In the late 1970's, when he became senior minister of Riverside Church in New York — an institution long known for its social agenda — he used his ministry to draw attention to the plight of the poor, to question American political and military power, to encourage interfaith understanding, and to campaign for nuclear disarmament. Courage, he preached over the years, was the first virtue, because "it makes all other virtues possible."

In his later years, he devoted himself to antiwar crusades, advocating a nuclear freeze, opposing the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf and speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But he did not consider himself a pacifist, and when genocide broke out in Bosnia, he asserted that there were times when international intervention with force was justified.

But it was as the outspoken chaplain at Yale in the tumultuous years when the Vietnam War was escalating that Dr. Coffin's name became known across America. While he questioned the wisdom of the war almost from the start, he came only slowly to a decision to apply to this cause the same tactics of civil disobedience he had already engaged in on behalf of the struggle for integration in the South.

Yet when he did, the spectacle he created — the chaplain of an Ivy League university counseling students that they were right to resist the draft, and accepting their draft cards to be turned in to the Justice Department — so infuriated the Johnson administration that Attorney General Ramsey Clark, himself a prominent liberal, sought to imprison him.

In one of the most celebrated trials of the day, Dr. Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock and three others were accused of conspiracy to encourage draft evasion. Dr. Coffin, Dr. Spock and two others were convicted, but the verdicts were overturned on appeal. The case became a cause célèbre for the antiwar left and civil libertarians, who considered the prosecution's eventual failure an incomplete vindication of the right of free speech.

Dr. Coffin had a distinctive view of his own role as a dissenter. His argument with American social practices and political policies, he said, was that of a partner engaged in a "lovers' quarrel." It was a position he could claim almost as a birthright, considering his lineage and the patrician positions he held.

His forebears traced to the Pilgrims, and his father, also named William Sloane Coffin, was a vice president of W. & J. Sloane, the furniture manufacturers, and president of the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His uncle, the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin, was president of Union Theological Seminary and the principal influence on his entry into the ministry.

And for almost all of Dr. Coffin's adult life, his service was performed in one or another institution near the heart of power and prestige: the Central Intelligence Agency, Andover, Williams College, Yale, and then Riverside Church, which had been built as an interdenominational house of worship with financing from John D. Rockefeller Jr.

So if Dr. Coffin preached on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden, he did so to the most prominent and talented of parishioners.

His enthusiastic ministry to the Vietnam generation at Yale prompted a Yale alumnus of those years, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, to gently lampoon him as the offbeat Rev. Scot Sloan ("the thoroughly modern minister/enabler") in "Doonesbury."

Another Yale man of the time, President Bush, has spoken of a less affectionate memory: After Mr. Bush's father lost a Senate race in 1964 to Senator Ralph Yarborough, Dr. Coffin told the young man, then a freshman, student that he knew his father and that the better man had won. (Dr. Coffin disputed the anecdote.)

After Dr. Coffin left Yale, disgust on the part of alumni with his political activities was often blamed for a decline in alumni contributions. But Yale was not the only university to deal with that problem in the 1970's.

Moreover, Dr. Coffin made the case that by addressing the anger, fears and frustrated idealism of the students, the Yale administration may have helped the university avoid the kind of fractures that left far deeper scars at Columbia and other universities.

William Sloane Coffin Jr. was born on June 1, 1924, in Manhattan. His father and his mother, Catherine Butterfield Coffin, were rearing him, a brother and a sister in a penthouse that occupied the 15th and 16th floors of a building on East 68th Street when the father died of a heart attack in December 1933. He had slipped and fallen on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With money less plentiful, Mrs. Coffin took the three children to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. She also took them to Paris, where young William studied harmony in hopes of becoming a classical pianist. The interest in music continued at Phillips Academy at Andover, from which he graduated in 1942, and for a year at Yale's music school. Then he entered the Army and was sent to Europe as an infantry officer.

Because of his facility with languages, he was made a liaison to the French and, later, the Russian Army. In 1946, he took part in operations to forcibly repatriate Soviet citizens who had been taken prisoner and who, once repatriated, were never heard from again. The deceptions in which he took part to gain the prisoners' trust before handing them over, he wrote in his memoir, "Once to Every Man" (Atheneum, 1977), "left me a burden of guilt I am sure to carry the rest of my life."

"Certainly," he added, "it influenced my decision in 1950 to spend three years in the C.I.A. opposing Stalin's regime."

His reference was to the years of the Korean War, which he spent in the C.I.A. after being recruited by a brother-in-law who was a top agency official. In Germany, he helped send anti-Soviet Russians back into Russia; they would parachute in by night and work against the Soviet regime in paramilitary teams.

"I had seen that Stalin could occasionally make look Hitler look like a Boy Scout," Dr. Coffin explained last year to a reporter for The New York Times, Tim Weiner, who was preparing a history of the C.I.A. "I was very anti-Soviet but very pro-Russian." But Soviet intelligence detected nearly all of the efforts, and Dr. Coffin said the missions nearly always ended in disaster. "It didn't work," he said. "It was a fundamentally bad idea. We were quite naïve about the use of American power."

The years in the spy agency, it turned out, were only an interlude. Before joining it in 1950, he had left the Army as a captain in 1947, returned to Yale and earned a degree in government. In 1949, he was captivated by the possibilities of a religious vocation when, at the urging of his Uncle Henry, he attended a conference at Union Theological Seminary and heard Reinhold Niebuhr and prominent ministers from Harlem speak.

So when he returned to the United States in 1953, it was to study for the ministry at Yale Divinity School. When he graduated in 1956, he returned to Andover as the school's acting chaplain.

That year he also married Eva Anna Rubenstein, an actor and dancer who was the daughter of the pianist Artur Rubenstein. The couple had three children before the marriage ended in divorce in 1968.

After spending a year at Williams College as chaplain, Dr. Coffin was named to the chaplain's post at Yale in 1958. The civil rights struggle was heating up, and he was arrested three times when he went south to join it. The arrests came in 1961, while taking part in a Freedom Ride in Montgomery, Ala.; in 1963, while protesting segregation at an amusement park near Baltimore; and in 1964, at a St. Augustine, Fla., lunch counter that he and others were trying to integrate.

Dr. Coffin said aides to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had tried to dissuade the Freedom Riders from making their trip in 1961. That first arrest caused some surprise at Yale. But Dr. Coffin said he was only setting a moral example.

"Every minister is given two roles, the priestly and the prophetic,"' he said later that year. "The prophetic role is the disturber of the peace, to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire moral order some judgment."

The athletic and voluble Dr. Coffin became a familiar figure on Yale's campus, riding his motor scooter, joking with students and challenging them to stand up for what they thought. But by 1967, the campus that had largely welcomed him back from Montgomery as a man of courage was convulsed with the passion surrounding the Vietnam War.

Much of the turmoil was over the draft, from which young men in college were exempt but which was waiting for them as soon as they left academia. Dr. Coffin, a critic of the country's war policy since 1965, had been a founder of a group called Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. But he had concluded that letter-writing and seeking out policy makers and members of Congress were having no effect.

In 1967, he chose a course of civil disobedience. First, he offered the chapel at Yale as a sanctuary for those who were refusing to serve in Vietnam.

Then, on Oct. 16 of that year, as a major demonstration at the Pentagon itself was being planned, Dr. Coffin helped preside at a service at the Arlington Street Church in Boston at which young men who were resisting the draft turned over their draft cards to him for delivery to the Justice Department. Dr. Coffin and three others left about 185 draft cards and 175 classification notices at the Justice Department in Washington on Oct. 20, a Friday, even as the capital braced for a weekend of demonstrations.

Dr. Coffin told James Reston, a Times columnist, that his effort was intended to mount a "fair and dignified" legal challenge to the draft, and his statement to the Justice Department made it clear that the protesters were courting arrest as a symbolic act — a position in accord with his statements that civil disobedience required confronting the draft and accepting the legal consequences.

There was no immediate arrest, however, as the capital focused on the confrontations in the streets between radical protesters and helmeted troops outside the Pentagon. But on Jan. 5, 1968, the Justice Department came back with a far more serious charge than the defendants had expected. It indicted Dr. Coffin, Dr. Spock and the three others on charges that they had engaged in a conspiracy to counsel draft evasion.

Dr. Coffin said he had not pushed the thought of draft evasion on anyone who did not already have it, but the government argued that this defied common sense, given the persuasive power that someone of his standing would have when he took a position or set an example.

Dr. Coffin, Dr. Spock and two of the other three were convicted of conspiracy, but the verdicts were overturned on appeal, largely because of errors made by the judge. Dr. Coffin could have been retried, but the government chose not to do so.

The case left him a national figure of protest — lionized by the left, vilified by the right, and puzzled over by his superiors at Yale.

Kingman Brewster Jr., an expert on constitutional law who would himself fall afoul of the Nixon administration, was Yale's president, and his reactions said a great deal about the difficulties Dr. Coffin's brand of conscience could present.

Eight days after Dr. Coffin turned in the draft cards in Washington, Mr. Brewster gave a speech to parents of Yale students and said, "I disagree with the chaplain's position on draft resistance, and in this instance deplore his style."

Two years later, after Dr. Coffin's conviction was overturned but before the government dropped the case, Mr. Brewster stood before entering freshmen and held up Dr. Coffin and Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York as two men who were "wholly unashamed of their high purpose."

He drew applause when he criticized the draft as "a system of conscription which makes the campus a draft haven and distorts career choices in an effort to avoid service in a war nobody wants to fight."

If the draft issue proved a political minefield for those seeking to hold Yale together, the pattern became only more complex as the war dragged on into the Nixon administration and another incendiary issue came to the forefront: the prosecution of Black Panthers in New Haven on kidnapping and murder charges.

In the spring of 1970, a constellation of spokesmen for the radical left — among them Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society, David Dellinger of the antiwar movement, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, the poet Allen Ginsberg and Black Panther leaders — convened a giant rally just outside the Yale campus to protest both the prosecution of the Panthers and the conduct of the war. Officials throughout the Northeast feared an explosion of violence at Yale's doorstep. National Guard troops were sent into New Haven.

Among Yale's students and faculty, political sympathy for the left ran high, but so did a concern to prevent violence. Students organized a group of marshals to keep tempers cool.

Dr. Coffin met with rally organizers, who chose to put the most fiery speakers on in the morning and the more boring ones on as night, with its potential for disruption, was about to fall. He served on a committee of monitors. And on the one night when events threatened to get out of hand, he helped persuade a National Guard commander to keep his troops inconspicuous.

In the end, the gathering proceeded largely peacefully, and when it was over many at Yale basked briefly in self-congratulation that the threat of serious violence had been averted.

Then came news that four young protesters had been killed when troops opened fire at Kent State University in Ohio, where a remarkably similar stage had been set that week — tense national guardsmen facing angry students — but with less success at controlling tempers and fears.

In September 1972, Dr. Coffin was a member of group of clergy and peace activists who went to Hanoi to accompany three released prisoners of war on their return to the United States.

He remained chaplain of Yale until 1976, when he stepped down to work with world hunger programs and write his memoir. A few months later, he separated from his second wife, Harriet Gibney, whom he had married in 1969. That marriage, like his first, ended in divorce and he remarried once more, to Virginia Randolph Wilson, who survives him.

Besides his daughter, by his first marriage, Amy, of Oakland, Calif., Dr. Coffin is survived by a son by his first marriage, David Coffin, of Gloucester, Mass.; his brother, Ned Coffin, of Strafford; his sister, Margot Lindsay, of Newton, Mass.; three grandchildren; two stepchildren, Jessica Tidman, of Strafford, and Wil Tidman, of San Francisco; and four stepgrandchildren. Another son by his first marriage, Alexander, died in 1983.

Dr. Coffin was appointed to the ministry at Riverside Church in 1978. There, he promoted international arms control and mobilized congregants to work on local issues like unemployment and juvenile delinquency.

In 1979, he was one of three American clergymen who, along with a fourth from Algeria, went to Tehran at their own expense to help the American hostages held there celebrate Christmas. In the 1980's, after leaving Riverside, he was a leader of Sane/Freeze, an organization that campaigned for disarmament and a freeze on nuclear testing.

Dr. Coffin's activities slowed considerably in the 1990's, and in 1999 he suffered a stroke. But he continued to write and speak out from his home in Strafford. In the spring and fall of 2003, he spoke out repeatedly in criticism of the war President Bush was leading in Iraq. Last October, he founded an organization of religious leaders calling for the elimination of nuclear arms.

In the fall of 2003, he preached at Riverside Church again, on World Communion Sunday, after being introduced by Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations. His voice resonant, even though his speech was slow and somewhat slurred, Dr. Coffin told the congregants that there was "a huge difference between patriotism and nationalism."

"Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race," he declared, adding: "Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country, but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports — one planet indivisible, with clean air, soil and water; with liberty, justice and peace for all."

Posted by lois at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

Coretta Scott King

January 31, 2006, NY Times
Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies
By PETER APPLEBOME
Coretta Scott King, first known as the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then as his widow, then as an avid proselytizer for his vision of racial peace and non-violent social change, has died, her sister in law, Christine King Farris, said this morning.

She was 78 and had been in failing health since suffering a stroke and heart attack last August. Mrs. King appeared at a benefit earlier this month, but did not speak, and was unable to attend the yearly celebration of Martin Luther King Day.

Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador and longtime family friend, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Mrs. King died in her sleep and was discovered by her daughter Bernice about 1 a.m. "It seemed as though she was resting when she passed away," Mr. Young said, according to the paper's Web site.

In a statement, the King family said that "Mrs. Coretta Scott King, first lady of human and civil rights, died overnight." Mrs. King rose from rural poverty in Heiberger, Ala., to become an international symbol of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and a tireless advocate for a long litany of social and political issues, ranging from women's rights to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that followed in its wake.

She was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1952 when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who on their first date told her: "The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all." A year later she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with Dr. King's assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Mrs. King did not hesitate to pick up his mantle, marching before her husband was even buried at the head of the garbage workers he had gone to Memphis to champion. She then went on to lead the effort for a national holiday in his honor and to found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, dedicated both to scholarship and to activism, where Dr. King is buried.

Aside from the trauma of her husband's death, which left her alone with four young children, Mrs. King faced other trials and controversies over the years. She was at times viewed as chilly and aloof by others in the movement. The King Center was criticized first as competing for funds and siphoning energy from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King had headed. In recent years, it has been widely viewed as adrift, characterized by intra-family squabbling and a focus more on Dr. King's legacy than continuing his work. And even many allies were baffled and hurt by her campaign to exonerate James Earl Ray, who in 1969 had pleaded guilty to her husband's murder, and her contention that Ray did not commit the crime.

But more often, Mrs. King has been seen as an inspirational figure around the world, a dogged advocate for her husband's causes and a woman of enormous spiritual depth who came to personify the ideals Dr. King fought for.

"She'll be remembered as a strong woman whose grace and dignity held up the image of her husband as a man of peace, of racial justice, of fairness," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King and then served as its president for 20 years. "I don't know that she was a civil rights leader in the truest sense, but she became a civil rights figure and a civil rights icon because of what she came to represent."

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, the middle of three children born to Obadiah and Bernice Scott. She grew up in the two-room house her father built on land that had been owned by the family for three generations.

From the start there was nothing predictable about her life. The family was poor, and she grew up picking cotton in the hot fields of the segregated South or doing housework. But Mr. Scott hauled timber, owned a country store and worked as a barber. His wife drove a school bus, and the whole family helped raise hogs, cows, chickens and vegetables. So by the standards of blacks in Alabama at the time the family had both resources and ambitions out of the reach of most others.

Some of Coretta Scott's earliest insights into the injustice of segregation came as she walked to her one-room school house each day, watching buses full of white children kick up dust as they passed. She got her first sense of the world beyond rural Alabama when she attended the Lincoln School, a private missionary institution in nearby Marion, where she studied piano and voice, had her first encounters with college-educated teachers and where she resolved to flee to a world far beyond the narrow confines of rural, segregated Alabama.

She graduated first in her high school class of 17 in 1945 and then began attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where two years earlier her older sister, Edythe, had become the first black to enroll. She studied education and music and after graduation went on to the New England Conservatory of Music, hoping to become a classical singer and working as a mail order clerk and cleaning houses to augment the fellowship that barely paid her tuition.

Her first encounter with the man who would become her husband did not begin auspiciously. Dr. King, very much in the market for a wife, called her after getting her name from a friend and announced: "You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo," he said. "I'm like Napoleon. I'm at my Waterloo, and I'm on my knees."

"That's absurd," Ms. Scott, two years his elder, replied. "You don't even know me."

Still, she agreed to meet for lunch the next day, only to be put off initially that he wasn't taller. But she was impressed by his erudition and confidence and he saw in this refined, intelligent woman what he was looking for as the wife of a preacher from one of Atlanta's most prominent ministerial families. When he proposed, she deliberated for six months before finally saying "yes" and they were married in the garden of her parents' house on June 18, 1953. The 350 guests, elegant big-city folks from Atlanta and rural neighbors from Alabama, made it the biggest wedding, white or black, the area had ever seen.

And even before the wedding she made it clear she intended to remain her own woman. She stunned Dr. King's father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., who presided over the wedding, by demanding that she wanted the promise to obey her husband removed from the wedding vows. Reluctantly, he went along. After it was over, the bridegroom fell asleep in the car back to Atlanta while the new Mrs. King did the driving.

Mrs. King thought she was signing on for the ministry, not ground zero in the seismic cultural struggle that would shake the South when he became minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1954. But just over a year later the Montgomery bus boycott brought Dr. King to national attention and then like riders on a runaway freight train, the minister and his young wife found themselves in the middle of a movement that would transform the South and ripple through the nation. In 1960, the family moved back to Atlanta, where he shared the pulpit of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father.

With four young children to raise — Yolanda born in 1955, Martin 3d in 1957, Dexter in 1961 and Bernice in 1963 — and a movement culture dominated by men, Mrs. King, for the most part, remained away from the front lines. But the recognition of danger was always there, including a brush with death when Dr. King was stabbed while autographing books in Harlem in 1958.

What role she would play was a source of some tension between them. While wanting to be there for their children, she also wanted to be active in the movement. He was, she has said, very traditional in his view of women and balked at the notion she should be more conspicuous.

"Martin was a very strong person, and in many ways had very traditional ideas about women," she told The New York Times Magazine in 1982. She continued: "He'd say, "I have no choice, I have to do this, but you haven't been called,' " "And I said, "Can't you understand? You know I have an urge to serve just like you have.' " Still, he always described her as a partner in his mission, not just a supportive spouse. "I wish I could say, to satisfy my masculine ego, that I led her down this path," he said in a 1967 interview. "But I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now."

Instead, she mostly carved out her own niche, most prominently through more than 30 "Freedom Concerts" where she lectured, read poetry and sang to raise awareness of and money for the civil rights movement.

The division disappeared with Dr. King's assassination. Suddenly, she was not just a symbol of the nation's grief but a woman very much devoted to carrying on her husband's work. Exactly how to do that was something that evolved over time. Marching in Memphis was a dramatic statement, but Ralph Abernathy, one of Dr. King's lieutenants, was chosen to take over his movement. In stepping in for her husband after his death, Mrs. King at first used his own words as much as possible, as if her goal were simply to maintain his presence, even in death.

But soon she developed her own language and own causes. So when she stood in for her husband at the Poor People's Campaign at the Lincoln Memorial on June 19, 1968, she spoke not just of his vision, but of hers, one about gender as well as race in which she called upon American women "to unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war." She joined the board of directors of the National Organization for Women as well as that of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became widely identified with a broad array of international human rights issues rather than being focused primarily on race.

That broad view, she would argue, was completely in keeping with Dr. King's vision as well. And to carry on that legacy, she focused on two ambitious and daunting tasks. The first was to have a national holiday in his honor, the second was to build a nationally recognized center in Atlanta to honor his memory, continue his work and provide a research center for scholars studying his work and the civil rights era. The first goal was achieved despite much opposition in 1983 when Congress approved a measure designating the third Monday in January as an official Federal holiday in honor of Dr. King, who was born in Atlanta Jan. 15, 1929.

President Ronald Reagan, who had long opposed the King Holiday as too expensive and inappropriate, signed the bill, but pointedly refrained from criticizing fellow Republicans such as Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who continued to denigrate Dr. King, saying he had consorted with Communists. The holiday was first observed on Jan. 20, 1986.

The second goal, much more expensive, time consuming and elusive remains to this day a work in progress — and a troubled one at that. When Mrs. King first announced plans for a memorial in 1969, she envisioned a Lincolnesque tomb, an exhibition hall, the restoration of her husband's childhood home, two separate buildings for institutes on non-violent social change and Afro-American studies, a library building an archives building and a museum of African-American life and culture. And she envisioned a center that would be a haven both for scholars and a training ground for advocates of non-violent social change.

Even friends say it may have been too ambitious a goal. Building the center was an enormous achievement in itself. But many of Dr. King's allies, particularly the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, grumbled that the center was draining scarce resources from the movement. And over the years the center struggled to find its mission. Critics worried it had become too much a family enterprise with her two sons, Dexter and Martin 3d vying to be its leader. Those problems became particularly acute after she suffered a stroke and heart attack in August 2005 and the two brothers struggled for control over the center while she was recuperating. As a result, many feel it has not become the scholarly resource it could have become, while never becoming a center for civil rights activism.

And many supporters were saddened and baffled by the family's campaign on behalf of James Earl Ray, who confessed to the murder, then recanted and died in 1998 while still seeking a new trial. After his death, Mrs. King issued a statement calling his death a tragedy for his family and for the nation and saying that a trial would have "produced new revelations about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray's innocence."

Still, to the end Mrs. King remained a beloved figure, often compared to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a woman who overcame tragedy, held her family together and became an inspirational presence around the world. Admirers said she bore her own special burden — being expected somehow to carry on her husband's work and teachings — with a sense of spirit and purpose that made her more than just a symbol.

If picking up Dr. King's mantle, in the end, was something of an impossible task, both of them described a relationship that was truly a partnership. "I think on many points she educated me," Dr. King once said. And she never veered from the conviction, expressed throughout her life, that his dream was her's as well. "I didn't learn my commitment from Martin," she once told an interviewer. "We just converged at a certain time."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 10, 2006

Harry Magdoff, Economist

January 9, 2006
Harry Magdoff, Economist, Dies at 92
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Harry Magdoff, who fell in love with Marxist thought at 15 and became an influential socialist economist, author, editor and commentator - and, some said, a Soviet spy - died on Jan. 1 at his home in Burlington, Vt. He was 92.
His son, Frederick, announced the death.

Mr. Magdoff, in his 1969 book "The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy," argued that the United States had an empire in all but name. His contention that American imperial ambitions, not anti-Communism, provoked the Vietnam War struck a responsive chord during that conflict. The book sold more than 100,000 copies and was translated into 15 languages.

For many years, Mr. Magdoff was co-editor of Monthly Review, a socialist journal, with Paul Sweezy, an influential Marxist economist who died in 2004. Together, they wrote many articles, some published in five books of essay collections. Their combined work, to which Mr. Magdoff supplied the more technical economic analyses, added up to a running commentary on what they deemed inherent deficiencies of modern capitalism.

Mr. Magdoff also held several influential positions during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, in which he developed and put into effect new ways of measuring the productivity of labor. His last federal post was as a top aide to Commerce Secretary Henry A. Wallace, a former vice president who ran for president on a leftist agenda in 1948.

In 1950, Richard M. Nixon, then a congressman, released a report accusing Mr. Magdoff of being part of a spy ring that fed secret economic data to the Soviet Union. Mr. Magdoff declined to answer questions about the allegations at a Senate hearing in 1953 and continued to refuse to talk about the matter in recent years as details emerged from American and Russian archives that some contend added weight to the earlier charges.

In any case, security concerns made it impossible for Mr. Magdoff to remain in government. He worked at a series of private sector jobs, sometimes under assumed names, including salesman for a television production company, insurance broker and stockbroker, a job that he, as a Marxist, particularly loathed.

He gained a measure of financial security by acquiring part ownership in Russell & Russell, a publisher of previously out-of-print scholarly books. He taught part time at the New School for Social Research and elsewhere.

Henry Samuel Magdoff was born on Aug. 21, 1913, in the Bronx, to immigrants from Russia. His father was a housepainter, and one of Mr. Magdoff's earliest memories was the glee with which family and friends greeted the downfall of the czar.

He remembered that as a child he was perplexed, then enraged, when he heard in a playground that Britain "owned" India. At 15, he read Marx's "Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy," which aroused his interest in radical economics. He said his most influential youthful experience was witnessing a demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square in Manhattan in 1930.

At City College of New York, he studied engineering, physics and mathematics before being expelled in a dispute with administrators over a leftist student publication. The expulsion came after he helped stage a mock trial of the college president and other officials, none of whom attended.

In 1932, Mr. Magdoff visited Chicago to participate in the founding conventions of the National Students League and the Youth League against War and Fascism. During that trip, he married Beatrice Greizer, known as Beadie, who had been marching on picket lines with her pro-union mother since she was a preschooler.

Mrs. Magdoff died in 2002 after nearly 70 years of marriage. Their son Michael has also died. In addition to his other son, Frederick, of Burlington and Fletcher, Vt., Mr. Magdoff is survived by a grandson.

After finishing his undergraduate degree at New York University, Mr. Magdoff went to Philadelphia to work for the Works Progress Administration, trying to solve interesting economic problems.

"You sat in an office supplied with research materials and were paid every week to sit and think why there was so much unemployment," he said in an interview in Monthly Review in 1999. "Who needed heaven?"

In 2004, Mr. Magdoff wrote about his friendship with Che Guevara, one of his revolutionary heroes. At what proved to be their final meeting before Mr. Guevara's death in 1967, Mr. Magdoff asked what he could do to help Cuba.
"Keep on educating me," was the response.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Rev. Jon de Cortina, Saved Salvadoran Children

January 9, 2006
The Rev. Jon de Cortina, 71, Is Dead; Saved Salvadoran Children
By GINGER THOMPSON
MEXICO CITY, Jan. 8 - The Rev. Jon de Cortina Garaigorta, a Jesuit priest who dedicated the last decade to searching for the missing children of El Salvador's brutal civil war, died in mid-December, officials of his organization said Wednesday. He was 71.

They said the cause was complications of a stroke.

The founder of the independent Association for Missing Children, Father de Cortina is credited with using basic detective work, then later DNA testing, to solve the disappearances of about 310 children.

Sandra Lobo, the coordinator of the group, said it had reunited 178 of those children with their parents. At least 50 of them had been adopted by unsuspecting Americans, she said.

Father de Cortina's mission began in 1992, when the war had ended and the United Nations Truth Commission opened investigations into widespread human rights abuses during the war. In the Chalatenango region, a handful of rural peasants came forward with testimony about how their children had been kidnapped by government troops. That led him to begin his search.

Word of his search spread across the country, bringing hundreds of reports of abducted children, as well as confessions from soldiers. They told him the kidnappings had been meant not only to terrorize supporters of the Marxist rebel group but also to raise money by selling the children to corrupt adoption agencies.

The Salvadoran military publicly acknowledged that families had been separated during the war, but always maintained that its officers had acted on the impulse to save children who had been abandoned or orphaned in fighting that left 75,000 people dead or missing.

"These children were robbed, abducted in the countryside by the military for a variety of motives," Father de Cortina said in a 1996 interview with The New York Times after the first few dozen missing children had been found and reunited with their families. "But we believe that the right to recover their identity, and the right of their families to know the fate of the children they lost, must be fulfilled and respected."

Born in 1934 in Bilbao, Spain, Father de Cortina joined the Society of Jesus in 1954, moved to El Salvador a year later and was ordained in 1968. He studied philosophy and civil engineering at St. Louis University, in Missouri, and theology in Frankfurt. He later became a professor of seismic engineering at the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana.

During the war, even after six of his Jesuit colleagues were killed by a secret military unit and Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was assassinated during a Mass, Father de Cortina remained an outspoken critic of the systematic abuses by the Salvadoran military, which had been trained and financed by the United States.

A month before he died, his work in El Salvador was recognized with St. Louis University's highest honor, the Sword of Ignatius Loyola.

"Instead of being frightened by the conflict around him, he became a tireless and articulate advocate for disclosing the atrocities that took place during the war," said Lawrence Biondi, president of St. Louis University. "He was the voice for the voiceless."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 08, 2006

Hugh Thompson, Who Saved Civilians at My Lai

January 7, 2006
Hugh Thompson, 62, Who Saved Civilians at My Lai, Dies
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Hugh Thompson, an Army helicopter pilot who rescued Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre, reported the killings to his superior officers in a rage over what he had seen, testified at the inquiries and received a commendation from the Army three decades later, died yesterday in Alexandria, La. He was 62.

The cause was cancer, Jay DeWorth, a spokesman for the Veterans Affairs Medical Center where Mr. Thompson died, told The Associated Press.

On March 16, 1968, Chief Warrant Officer Thompson and his two crewmen were flying on a reconnaissance mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when they spotted the bodies of men, women and children strewn over the landscape.

Mr. Thompson landed twice in an effort to determine what was happening, finally coming to the realization that a massacre was taking place. The second time, he touched down near a bunker in which a group of about 10 civilians were being menaced by American troops. Using hand signals, Mr. Thompson persuaded the Vietnamese to come out while ordering his gunner and his crew chief to shoot any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. None did.

Mr. Thompson radioed for a helicopter gunship to evacuate the group, and then his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, pulled a boy from a nearby irrigation ditch, and their helicopter flew him to safety.

Mr. Thompson told of what he had seen when he returned to his base.

"They said I was screaming quite loud," he told U.S. News & World Report in 2004. "I threatened never to fly again. I didn't want to be a part of that. It wasn't war."

Mr. Thompson remained in combat, then returned to the United States to train helicopter pilots. When the revelations about My Lai surfaced, he testified before Congress, a military inquiry and the court-martial of Lt. William L. Calley Jr., the platoon leader at My Lai, who was the only soldier to be convicted in the massacre.

When Mr. Thompson returned home, it seemed to him that he was viewed as the guilty party.

"I'd received death threats over the phone," he told the CBS News program "60 Minutes" in 2004. "Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up. So I was not a good guy."

On March 6, 1998, the Army presented the Soldier's Medal, for heroism not involving conflict with an enemy, to Mr. Thompson; to his gunner, Lawrence Colburn; and, posthumously, to Mr. Andreotta, who was killed in a helicopter crash three weeks after the My Lai massacre.

The citation, bestowed in a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, said the three crewmen landed "in the line of fire between American ground troops and fleeing Vietnamese civilians to prevent their murder."

On March 16, 1998, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Colburn attended a service at My Lai marking the 30th anniversary of the massacre.

"Something terrible happened here 30 years ago today," Mr. Thompson was quoted as saying by CNN. "I cannot explain why it happened. I just wish our crew that day could have helped more people than we did."

Mr. Thompson worked as a veterans' counselor in Louisiana after leaving military service. A list of his survivors was not immediately available.

Through the years, he continued to speak out, having been invited to West Point and other military installations to tell of the moral and legal obligations of soldiers in wartime.

He was presumably mindful of the ostracism he had faced and the long wait for that medal ceremony in Washington. As he told The Associated Press in 2004: "Don't do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Compan

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January 06, 2006

Lou Rawls

January 6, 2006
Lou Rawls, Grammy Award-Winning Singer, Dies at 72
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:49 a.m. ET

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Lou Rawls, the velvet-voiced singer who started as a church choir boy and went on to record such classic tunes as ''You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,'' died Friday of cancer. He was 72.

Rawls died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was hospitalized last month for treatment of lung and brain cancer, said his publicist, Paul Shefrin. His wife, Nina, was at his bedside when he died.

Rawls' family and Shefrin said the singer was 72, although other records indicate he was 70.

Rawls' deep, smooth voice was his trademark, and he used it in a variety of genres.

''I've gone the full spectrum, from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop,'' Rawls once said on his Web site. ''And the public has accepted what I've done through it all.''

Rawls' grandmother introduced him to gospel in his hometown of Chicago. The singer moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s to join a touring gospel group, the Pilgrim Travelers.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Rawls rejoined the Pilgrim Travelers in Los Angeles, where he sang with Sam Cooke. Rawls performed with Dick Clark at the Hollywood Bowl in 1959, and he later he opened for The Beatles at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.

Rawls was playing small blues and R&B clubs in Los Angeles when his four-octave range caught the ear of a Capitol Records producer, who signed him to the label in 1962.

His debut effort, ''Stormy Monday,'' recorded with the Les McCann Trio, was the first of 28 albums Rawls made with Capitol.

In 1966, his ''Love Is a Hurtin' Thing'' topped the charts and earned Rawls his first two Grammy nominations. He won three Grammys in his career and released his most recent album, ''Seasons 4 U,'' in 1998 on his own label, Rawls & Brokaw Records.

He also appeared in 18 movies, including ''Leaving Las Vegas'' and ''Blues Brothers 2000,'' and 16 television series, including ''Fantasy Island'' and ''The Fall Guy.''

A longtime community activist, Rawls visited schools, playgrounds and community centers in the 1960s, encouraging children to continue their studies and have confidence in their abilities. In the '80s, he helped the United Negro College Fund raise more than $200 million through telethons.

In 1976, Rawls became the corporate spokesman for the Anheuser-Busch Cos. breweries.

Rawls was diagnosed with lung cancer in December 2004 and brain cancer in May 2005.

Besides his wife, Rawls is survived by four children: Louanna Rawls, Lou Rawls Jr., Kendra Smith and Aiden Rawls.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete, Shefrin said.

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January 04, 2006

Frank Wilkinson, Fighter For Civil Liberties

January 4, 2006
Wilkinson, Defiant Figure of Red Scare, Dies at 91
By RICK LYMAN
Frank Wilkinson, a Los Angeles housing official who lost his job in the Red Scare of the early 1950's and later became one of the last two people jailed for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether he was a Communist, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Mr. Wilkinson, whose experiences inspired a half-century campaign against government spying, had been ill for several months and was recovering from surgery and a fall, said Donna Wilkinson, his wife of 40 years. "It was just the complications of old age, " Mrs. Wilkinson said.

In 1952, when Mr. Wilkinson was head of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, he spearheaded a project to replace the sprawling Mexican-American neighborhood of Chavez Ravine, home to 300 families and roamed by goats and other livestock, with thousands of public-housing units.

Real estate interests that viewed public housing as a form of socialism accused Mr. Wilkinson of being a Communist. When asked about this, under oath, he declined to answer, causing a furor.

After a City Council hearing, in which Mayor Fletcher Bowron punched a man in the audience who had called him a "servant of Stalin," Mr. Wilkinson was questioned by the California Anti-Subversive Committee. Mr. Wilkinson was fired along with four other housing officials and five schools employees, including his first wife, Jean.

The housing project was scuttled and much of the land eventually turned over to the city, after which it became the site of Dodger Stadium, new home to the former Brooklyn Dodgers.

The entire episode has inspired books, documentaries, a play and even a recently released album by Ry Cooder called "Chavez Ravine." "Every church has its prophets and its elders," one song goes. "God will love you if you just play ball."

Mr. Wilkinson consistently refused to testify about his political beliefs. He had, in fact, joined the Communist Party in 1942, according to "First Amendment Felon," a 2005 biography by Robert Sherrill. He left the party in 1975.

Mr. Wilkinson continued his antipoverty activities and, in 1955, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which wanted to know whether he was a Communist. This time, Mr. Wilkinson used what he believed was a novel approach. Instead of claiming his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, he refused to answer on First Amendment grounds, saying the committee had no right to ask him.

The committee requested that Congress cite Mr. Wilkinson for contempt, but it was not until 1958 that he and a co-worker, Carl Braden, became the last men ordered to prison at the committee's behest. Mr. Wilkinson fought the contempt citation in the courts, but the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5 to 4, affirmed it.

At a press conference after the decision, Mr. Wilkinson said: "We will not save free speech if we are not prepared to go to jail in its defense. I am prepared to pay that price."

In 1961, the year construction began on Dodger Stadium, Mr. Wilkinson spent nine months at the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa. He came out of prison, he said, determined to fight for the committee's abolition. For the next decade, he traveled the country, speaking and protesting, largely through his National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, based in Los Angeles.

On Jan. 14, 1975, when the committee was finally abolished, Representative Robert F. Drinan, Democrat of Massachusetts, paid tribute to Mr. Wilkinson, saying, "No account of the demise of the House Un-American Activities Committee would be complete without a notation of the extraordinary work done by the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation."

But Mr. Wilkinson was not finished with the federal government. When he discovered, in 1986, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been compiling files on him, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for their release.

He was sent 4,500 documents. But he sued for more, and the next year the F.B.I. released an additional 30,000 documents, and then 70,000 two years later. Eventually, there were 132,000 documents covering 38 years of surveillance, including detailed reports of Mr. Wilkinson's travel arrangements and speaking schedules, and vague and mysterious accusations of an assassination attempt against Mr. Wilkinson in 1964.

A federal judge ordered the F.B.I. to stop spying on Mr. Wilkinson and to never do it again.

He is survived by his first wife, Jean, of Oakland, Calif.; their three children, Jeffry Wilkinson, of Albany, Calif., Tony Wilkinson, of Berkeley, Calif., and Jo Wilkinson of Tucson; and by his second wife, Donna; her three children from a previous marriage, John, William and Robert Childers; 19 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Frank Wilkinson was born Aug. 16, 1914, in a cottage behind his family's lakeside retreat in Charlevoix, Mich. His father, a doctor, came from a family that had lived in America since colonial days. His mother was French Canadian. Mr. Wilkinson was the youngest of four children.

Mr. Wilkinson's father fell in love with Arizona while posted there in World War I and moved the family to Douglas, Ariz., after the war. The family lived there until Frank was 10, then moved to Hollywood for two years while their permanent home was being built in Beverly Hills.

They were a devout Methodist family and firm Republicans. "Every morning of my life, we had Bible readings and prayers at the breakfast table," Mr. Wilkinson once said.

He attended Beverly Hills High School and then the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1936. He was active in the Methodist Youth Movement, president of the Hollywood Young People's chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and an organizer for Youth for Herbert Hoover.

After college, considering a career in the ministry, he decided to tour the Holy Land. On the way, along Maxwell Street in Chicago, the Bowery in New York and later in the Middle East, he had his first glimpse at wrenching poverty, and he described it as a life-altering experience.

Mr. Wilkinson lost his faith and found himself adrift. "What do you do if you have no religion?" he said. "What is the basis of your ethics?" He chose to become active in efforts to eradicate the kind of poverty he had seen in his travels.

In later years, he would spend months on the road, speaking to whatever group would listen to him, usually telling his own story and answering questions.

In 1999, he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Civil Liberties Union. Four years earlier, the City of Los Angeles, which had once fired him, issued a citation praising Mr. Wilkinson for his "lifetime commitment to civil liberties and for making this community a better place in which to live."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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December 19, 2005

Northampton, MA: Lawyer who fought legality of drug roadblocks dies in car accident

Dedicated lawyer dies in collision
BY SCOTT MERZBACH STAFF WRITER
GERI LAVENTIS
NORTHAMPTON - Longtime defense attorney Geri Laventis, who six years ago successfully argued a landmark case resulting in the ruling that police roadblocks to catch drug dealers are unconstitutional, was killed late Saturday night in a three-car accident.
Laventis, 58, of 31 Gregory Lane, Florence, was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, on South Street near Lyman Road, Saturday at 11:23 p.m., police said.

Laventis, who practiced law from an office in Holyoke, was described by colleagues as a zealous advocate for the rights of the accused, a fierce defender of the Constitution, and a woman of great integrity both in and out of the courtroom.

'She was a dedicated fighter for her clients; she worked very hard and cared very much for defendants' rights,' Northampton attorney Colleen Currie said this morning. 'She worked very hard to do the best for her clients in difficult situations.'

Stella Xanthakos, another city attorney, described Laventis as an 'extraordinary advocate' this morning.
'She gave her heart and soul to her clients,' said Xanthakos. 'She never ceased finding ways to help people, always finding the good in people.'

She said she had known Laventis for 20 years, both as a professional and as a city resident.'She had such a love of life and lived it with such integrity, compassion, and passion in life and in the courtroom,' said Xanthakos.

The accident
Laventis was driving a 1996 Honda Accord north on South Street when it collided head on with a 1997 Ford pickup truck, driven by Jacob Liptak, 23, of Westfield, that had crossed the center line as it was negotiating a turn while traveling south near Lyman Road, police said.
Liptak's truck then collided with a 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier driven by Amanda Garlick, no age available, of 80 North St., Whately, that was also heading north on South Street, police said.
Liptak, who had leg and head injuries, and passenger Samantha Serre, 22, also of Westfield, who had knee injuries, were both transported by AMR ambulance to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield.
Serre was listed in fair condition Sunday afternoon; no condition was available for Liptak. There was no further information for either Serre or Liptak available from the hospital this morning.
Garlick was transported by AMR ambulance to Cooley Dickinson Hospital with shoulder, chest, ankle and knee injuries, police said. She was treated and released, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
Police are still investigating whether occupants of all three vehicles were wearing seat belts. Airbags deployed in both the Liptak and Garlick vehicles.
Police said road conditions were not a factor in the collision, and the accident remains under investigation. No citations or charges have been filed.
This morning police said the accident is still under investigation and anyone who witnessed the accident is asked to contact them at 587-1105.
Laventis legacy
Originally from Beverly, on the north shore of Boston, Laventis grew up as the youngest child of parents Constantine and Katherine Laventis, both natives of Greece. During the summer, her father ran a fruit and vegetable stand at an outdoor market in Salem.
Laventis had made her home in Northampton since 1973 and ran her law practice from offices in Holyoke.
In perhaps her most famous case, Laventis in 1999 argued before the state's Supreme Judicial Court in Boston that a roadblock in Holyoke designed to search for drugs should be declared unconstitutional as an illegal search and seizure. Her client, Hector Rodriguez, had been arrested for possession of a small amount of marijuana as a result of such a roadblock in November 1997.
Northampton attorney William Newman, who noted the case that became known as 'drug roadblock' case as her professional legacy, represented the ACLU of Massachusetts in the same case.
'It was a pleasure to work with a dedicated defense lawyer who zealously represented the rights of her client and in doing so helped guarantee the fundamental constitutional rights of all persons in the Commonwealth,' Newman wrote in an email.
Laventis said a favorable decision by the court in the case, which was supported by civil libertarians, would have far-reaching effects on the use of such roadblocks.
'I think it's pretty scary that it gives that much discretion to the police,' Laventis told the Gazette at the time. 'It gives them a tool to harass people - and harass minority people - and all in the name of drug interdiction.'
The court ruled unanimously that checkpoints for drunken drivers are a 'minimal and focused intrusion' on people that are intended to remove a deadly and immediate menace from the road, while the kinds of drug roadblocks that led to her client's arrest are generalized searches to discover evidence of criminal activity, without any probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
Laventis was also successful in 1997 in getting overturned a zero-tolerance drug policy in the Easthampton public schools, and in reinstating a student expelled as a result of this policy.
Laventis represented a 16-year-old student after the student had allegedly smoked marijuana on a class trip to Canada. Citing failure to comply with due process, Laventis said the school had not held a hearing before issuing the suspension, had not given proper notice before the expulsion hearing and had failed to provide copies of witnesses' statements before the expulsion hearing.

A Hampshire Superior Court judge ruled that the mandatory expulsion policy was invalid and that the School Department's zero-tolerance policy contradicted the Education Reform Act of 1993, which leaves the decision to expel students caught with drugs or weapons in the hands of their principal.

Her client was one of five students who eventually reached a cash settlement with the school.
Besides her professional work, Laventis was also active in the city of Northampton, seeking a School Committee seat in 2001 and sponsoring a team in this year's Northampton Adult Spelling Bee, which benefits the Northampton Education Foundation.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.

Posted by lois at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

"Judge Constance Baker Motely: A Significant Life"

Issue 159 - November 17 2005
Judge Constance Baker Motley:
‘A Significant Life’
by Donita Judge
Guest Commentator

On a Friday morning in early November, I, along with hundreds of others, attended the memorial service at Riverside Church in New York City for Judge Constance Baker Motley. Unlike the services of Mrs. Rosa Parks, held earlier in the week, there was little fanfare. There was no two-hour wait to join the many persons who came to pay respects, rather there were seats for all who chose to attend. There were many judges, scholars, civil rights activists and politicians who attended this moving memorial, but it was your ordinary people who just "stopped by" to remember and honor Judge Motley that remain etched in my mind. One woman said she heard about it at the last minute, cut short her morning errands and came to pay respect to a woman who worked tirelessly and quietly to eradicate some of our country's worst injustices. I sense some of the persons in attendance were there because maybe they had met her walking the streets of New York or like me, met her for the first time when she was honored last year at the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in Washington, D.C., for her lifelong work. There is great significance to Judge Motley's life and her passing.

Judge Motley’s life is significant because while a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., she worked determinedly to end segregation in public education, won 9 of 10 cases tried before the U.S. Supreme Court, became the first African American woman to be elected to the New York State Senate, first woman elected as Manhattan’s Borough President, and the first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Her life is significant because she was not viewed solely as an icon but as a woman, who happened to be black, who not only sat as a jurist on the federal bench but also stood for “Equal Justice Under Law” and brought black women’s participation into full view.

This period in time is noteworthy because in the past four weeks, our country and our community have lost the voices of four women who stepped forward to move our country closer to equality when the possibility of equal opportunity appeared an impossibility: Judge Constance Baker Motley, C. DeLores Tucker, Vivian Malone Jones and Rosa Parks. It is important because in many ways these women were linked to one another and to all of us. Judge Motley represented Vivian Malone Jones in her successful attempt to gain admission to the University of Alabama. Mrs. Jones went on to become the first African American woman to graduate from that University. C. DeLores Tucker fought tirelessly to increase opportunities for black women, stood firmly and would not be moved when she objected to lyrics of music that she believed denigrated black women. Rosa Parks, among other contributions to our community, sat down for a moment in time that altered the course of history. These contributions are significant because these women shared courage of conviction and understood they could and should make a difference. It is appropriate and important that we honor each of them.

I would like to be privileged to the conversations between these women when they finally have an opportunity to meet again: I imagine “DeLores” holding open the door to allow all the sisters to enter; “Vivian” will offer a resounding statement, “it is only important to be first when there are others coming up behind you;” I am sure “Rosa” will quietly add, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around” and finally, I imagine “Connie” remarking, “we have fought a good fight but the struggle is far from over . . . ”

For whatever the reasons hundreds came together on a beautiful fall morning to remember Judge Constance Baker Motley and to bid her farewell, it was a fitting and poignant tribute by family, friends, and acquaintances who sat quietly as she was honored and remembered.

Rest peacefully Judge Constance Baker Motley, for yours was a significant life.

Donita Judge is a NJ Local Advocate/Staff Attorney for Advancement Project in Washington, D.C. She is also an adjunct professor in the African-American and African Studies Department at Rutgers University in Newak, New Jersey. She can be contacted at DJudge10l@aol.com.

Posted by lois at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2005

Vine Deloria, Jr. Champion of Indian Rights, Dies at 72

November 15, 2005

By KIRK JOHNSON, NY Times
DENVER, Nov. 14 - Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux who burst into the American consciousness in 1969 with his book "Custer Died for Your Sins" and later amplified his message through 20 more books about the Native American experience, died on Sunday, a family friend said.

He was 72 and lived in Golden, just west of Denver, and had recently been hospitalized with an aortic aneurysm.

Mr. Deloria, who was trained as both a seminarian and a lawyer, steadfastly worked to demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians. The myths, he often said - whether as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in fostering guilt - were both shallow. The truth, he said, was a mix, and only in understanding that mix, he argued, could either side ever fully heal.

And while his Custer book, with its incendiary title, was categorized at the time as an angry young man's anthem, Mr. Deloria's real weapon, critics and admirers said, was his scathing, sardonic humor, which he was able to use on both sides of the Indian-white divide. He once called the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were defeated by a combined force of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne in 1876 in the Montana territory, "a sensitivity-training session."

"We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years," he wrote in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 1976. "From a childish search for mythical cities of gold and fountains of youth to the simple recognition that lands are essential for human existence."

In "We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf" (1970), Mr. Deloria argued that technology and corporate values were destroying American life, and urged a return to the tribal standards of Indian culture as a window to salvation.

In "God is Red" (1973), he took that position of deliverance-through-Indian-ways further, arguing that American Indian spiritual traditions, far from being dated, were in fact more in tune with the needs of the modern world than Christianity, which Mr. Deloria said fostered imperialism and disregard for the planet's ecology.

But Mr. Deloria often said he was writing for Indian audiences most of all, hoping, he said, to instill belief in a culture had been shattered by history, and by deliberate government policy.

"If you mark down the great figures of the American West in recent times, he belongs there because of his role in reshaping Indian country," said Charles F. Wilkinson, a professor of law at the University of Colorado and a longtime friend. "I think in the last 100 years, he's been the most important person in Indian affairs, period."

Vine Deloria Jr. was born in the depths of the Great Depression, on March 26, 1933, in one of the poorest parts of the nation, then or now, in the town of Martin, S.D., near the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation, the son of a Indian Episcopalian clergyman. The family name, according to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, was derived from the name of a French fur trapper called Des Lauriers, who was taken into the tribe around 1800.

He was educated initially in reservation schools, and after a stint in the Marines in the 1950's, received a degree in general science from Iowa State University.

But religion and spirituality at the border of Indian and white ways was a running theme in the Deloria family - an ancestor, the encyclopedia entry says, was one of the earliest Sioux converts to Christianity, in the 1860's - and Mr. Deloria eventually followed his father's path and received a master's degree in theology in 1963 from the Lutheran School of Theology in Illinois.

From there, from 1964 to 1967, he worked for the National Conference of American Indians, where even before the book that made him famous, he became a leading spokesman for Indians in Washington as the group's leader. He often testified before Congress at time when the ferment of ideas and social movements in civil rights and ethnic identity were in full boil.

He took a law degree at the University of Colorado in 1970, and later, in 1990, joined its faculty, teaching history until his retirement in 2000.

His first book, "Custer Died For Your Sins," made him a national symbol. The book was not a history, but rather a personal, passionate statement. The New York Times reviewer John Leonard said it was Mr. Deloria's emergence as a real person through the book's pages that was the ultimate power of its argument.

"We have fashioned a style for accommodating our guilt, for eating statistics," Mr. Leonard wrote. "We haven't yet been able, and hopefully never will be, to posture successfully in front of a real person."

Mr. Deloria's other books included "Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties"(1974) and "The Metaphysics of Modern Existence" (1979).

Mr. Deloria is survived by his wife, Barbara, of Golden; three children, Philip, Daniel and Jeanne; a brother; a sister; and seven grandchildren.

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

David Ruiz, 63, Prisoner who Struggled for the Rights of Prisoners

November 15, 2005
David Ruiz, 63, Convict Who Won Reform With Handwritten Lawsuit, Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON, Nov. 14 (AP) - David Ruiz, the convict whose handwritten lawsuit more than three decades ago led to court-ordered improvements in Texas prisons, died on Saturday at the prison hospital in Galveston. He was 63.

His death was announced by Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

He was serving a life term for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and perjury, and most recently had been housed in a unit south of Huntsville.

Among the numerous grievances and legal challenges Mr. Ruiz filed while incarcerated was a lawsuit in 1972 saying Texas prisons were overcrowded and understaffed, with poor medical care and rampant violence that denied inmates their civil rights.

In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court ruled in favor of Mr. Ruiz and ordered changes. The State Legislature passed laws to reduce the inmate population, but by the mid-1980's the prisons were among the most dangerous in the country, with gang violence and fatal stabbings routine.

Judge Justice threatened the state with huge fines, and in early 1987 he found the state in contempt. Late that year, voters approved a half-billion dollars in bonds for prison construction, the first step in a building program that today includes more than 100 prisons housing an estimated 154,000 inmates.

"We are still human beings and should be treated in a humane manner, and there are laws supporting that," Mr. Ruiz said in a 1992 interview. "If you cage an animal and kick him every day, one day that animal is going to attack."

Over the years, Mr. Ruiz had spent time in more than a half-dozen Texas prisons and later some federal lockups.

In April 1988, he was knifed in a federal prison in Indiana in what his lawyer at the time said was a hit ordered by a prison gang in retribution for the lawsuit that ended the "building tender" system, where dominant convicts served as guards. At his request, he was returned to Texas custody.

He was serving life for a robbery committed during a brief parole in 1983.

Posted by lois at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

Rosa Parks, Founding Organizer of he Civil Rights Movement

October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies
By E. R. SHIPP

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

Her death was confirmed by Dennis W. Archer, the former mayor of Detroit.

For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.

"Mrs. Parks's arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest," Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, "Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."

Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.

"She sat down in order that we might stand up," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from South Africa. "Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom."

Even in the last years of her life, the frail Mrs. Parks made appearances at events and commemorations, saying little but lending the considerable strength of her presence. In recent years, she suffered from dementia, according to medical records released during a lawsuit over the use of her name by the hip-hop group OutKast.Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a "plant" by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.' "

In "Stride Toward Freedom," Dr. King wrote, "Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.' "

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people."

But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights movement," as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.'s coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop that she was running for teenagers that weekend.

"So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested," she said in an interview in 1988.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system's riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

For years blacks had complained, and Mrs. Parks was no exception. "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest," she said. "I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

After a confrontation in 1943, a driver named James Blake ejected Mrs. Parks from his bus. As fate would have it, he was driving the Cleveland Avenue bus on Dec. 1, 1955. He demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied.

Recalling the incident for "Eyes on the Prize," a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks said: "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.' "

Her arrest was the answer to prayers for the Women's Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E. D. Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in Montgomery.

Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. They had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl's arrest for refusing to give up her seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those raising money for the girl's defense. But when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery - not one of the finest Negro citizens - but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery," Dr. King said.

While Mr. Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women's council distributed 35,000 copies of a handbill that urged blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Mrs. Parks's trial.

"Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday," the leaflet said.

On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many black pulpits, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser, a black newspaper, further spread the word.

Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Others rode in black-owned taxis that charged only the bus fare, 10 cents. But most black commuters - 40,000 people - walked, some more than 20 miles.

At a church rally that night, blacks unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until these demands were met: that they be treated with courtesy, that black drivers be hired, and that seating in the middle of the bus go on a first-come basis.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses. Churches and houses, including those of Dr. King and Mr. Nixon, were dynamited.

Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day. But the violence escalated: snipers fired into buses as well as Dr. King's home, and bombs were tossed into churches and into the homes of ministers.

Early the next year, the Parkses left Montgomery for Hampton, Va., largely because Mrs. Parks had been unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with Dr. King and other leaders of the city's struggling civil rights movement.

Later that year, at the urging of her younger brother, Sylvester, Mrs. Parks, her husband and her mother, Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit. Mrs. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when Representative John Conyers Jr. hired her as an aide for his Congressional office in Detroit. She retired in 1988.

"There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation," Mr. Conyers said yesterday in a statement, "and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals."

Mrs. Parks's husband, Raymond, died in 1977. There are no immediate survivors.

In the last decade, Mrs. Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But even as she remained an icon of textbooks , her final years were troubled. She was hospitalized after a 28-year-old man beat her in her home and stole $53. She had problems paying her rent, relying on a local church for support until last December, when her landlord stopped charging her rent.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Ala., on Feb. 4, 1913, the elder of Leona and James McCauley's two children. Although the McCauleys were farmers, Mr. McCauley also worked as a carpenter and Mrs. McCauley as a teacher.

Rosa McCauley attended rural schools until she was 11 years old, then Miss White's School for Girls in Montgomery. She attended high school at the Alabama State Teachers College, but dropped out to care for her ailing grandmother. It was not until she was 21 that she earned a high school diploma.

Shy and soft-spoken, Mrs. Parks often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed upon her by blacks, who revered her as a symbol of their quest for dignity and equality. She would say that she hoped only to inspire others, especially young people, "to be dedicated enough to make useful lives for themselves and to help others."

She also expressed fear that since the birthday of Dr. King became a national holiday, his image was being watered down and he was being depicted as merely a "dreamer."

"As I remember him, he was more than a dreamer," Mrs. Parks said. "He was an activist who believed in acting as well as speaking out against oppression."

She would laugh in recalling some of her experiences with children whose curiosity often outstripped their grasp of history: "They want to know if I was alive during slavery times. They equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ask if I knew them."

Correction: Oct. 26, 2005, Wednesday:

Because of an editing error, a front-page obituary of Rosa Parks in late editions yesterday referred incorrectly to The Montgomery Advertiser, which printed a front-page article on Dec. 4, 1955, that publicized a boycott of Montgomery's buses the next day. It is a general-interest newspaper, not a black one.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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October 14, 2005

Vivian Malone Jones, 63, Dies; First Black Graduate of the Univ. of Alabama

October 14, 2005

By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times
Vivian Malone Jones, who on a blisteringly hot June day in 1963 became one of two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama after first being barred at the door by the defiant governor, George C. Wallace, died yesterday in Atlanta. She was 63.

The cause was a stroke, her sister Sharon Malone told The Associated Press.

Her entrance to the university came as the civil rights struggle raged across the South. On June 12, the day after Ms. Jones and James Hood were escorted into the university by federalized National Guard troops, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in Jackson, Miss.

On May 30, 1965, Ms. Jones became the first black to graduate from the University of Alabama in its 134 years of existence, earning a degree in business management with a B-plus average.

The performance of Governor Wallace, who stood at the doorway of Foster Auditorium flanked by state troopers, fulfilled a campaign pledge stop integration at "the schoolhouse door."

But historians have written that his defiance was scripted and came with a promise to federal authorities that he would be brief and would soon comply.

At the time, The Tuscaloosa News wrote contemptuously that the governor "squeezed every suspenseful moment of drama from the occasion."

The students waited in a car, as Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, deputy attorney general of the United States, avoided a direct confrontation. He said to Mr. Wallace: "From the outset, Governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students."

Only after the federalized guard troops arrived, four and a half hours after Mr. Wallace's initial refusal, were the students admitted. Mr. Wallace read a second statement challenging the constitutionality of the court order, then briskly left.

The students entered Foster Hall, registered, went to their dormitories, ate in the cafeteria and experienced no further incidents that day.

The first African-American at the university, founded in 1831, was Autherine Lucy, who arrived in February 1956 to pursue a master's degree in library science. But after experiencing three days of threats Ms. Lucy was suspended, ostensibly for her own safety, and later expelled.

More than 35 years later, she earned a master's degree in elementary education at Alabama.

Mr. Hood left the university after two months, saying he wanted to avoid "a complete mental and physical breakdown." He transferred to Wayne State University in Detroit and graduated with a bachelor's degree, having studied political science and police administration.

Mr. Hood. returned to the University of Alabama and earned a doctorate in higher education in 1997.

Vivian Juanita Malone grew up in Mobile, Ala., where she was a member of the National Honor Society in high school.

She earned a bachelor's degree at Alabama A & M, a predominantly black university, but it lost its accreditation. To get an accredited degree, she applied to the University of Alabama's School of Commerce and Business Administration and was admitted as a junior.

One night at midnight, someone knocked on her dormitory door and told her there was a bomb threat. No bomb materialized, but that November, there were three bomb blasts at the university, one of them four blocks from her dormitory.

After Mr. Evers was killed, Ms. Jones said she felt even more determined not to give up.

"I decided not to show any fear and went to classes that day," she said in an interview with The Post Standard of Syracuse in 2004.

In the same interview, she said one of her strongest memories of Alabama was that she often smiled at white students, but got no response.

The university hired a driver for her, a student at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa named Mack Jones. They later married, and he became an obstetrician. He died last year.

Ms. Jones is survived by her son, Michael A. Jones; her daughter, Monica Jones Shareef; three brothers; four sisters; and two grandchildren.

After graduating from Alabama, Ms. Jones worked for the United States Justice Department in its civil rights division. She also worked at the Environmental Protection Agency as director of civil rights and urban affairs and director of environmental justice before retiring in 1996 to sell life insurance.

In 1996, former Governor Wallace presented the Lurleen B. Wallace Award for Courage, named for his late wife, to Ms. Jones. He told her that he made a mistake 33 years earlier and that he admired her. They discussed forgiveness.

In a speech to University of Alabama graduates in 2000, Ms. Jones suggested one lesson that might be taken from her historic experience: "You must always be ready to seize the moment."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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October 08, 2005

John van Hengel Dies, Set Up First Food Bank in the U.S.

October 8, 2005

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
John van Hengel, who set up the nation's first food bank, in Phoenix, to distribute unmarketable food to the hungry and then a national organization, Second Harvest, to spread the concept, died Wednesday at a hospice in Phoenix. He was 83.

Cynde Cerf, spokeswoman for St. Mary's Food Bank, Mr. van Hengel's initial enterprise, said Mr. van Hengel had had several strokes and Parkinson's disease. Second Harvest grew into one of the nation's largest and most respected nonprofit organizations, and last year distributed nearly two billion pounds of food to more than 50,000 local charitable agencies. These, in turn, operate 94,000 programs, including soup kitchens, pantries and after-school programs that provide emergency food assistance to 23 million Americans each year.

The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 10 percent of Americans rely on this nonprofit distribution chain for their nutritional needs. The idea is simple: much edible food that is wasted can be collected and redirected to feed the hungry.

A central depository, or food bank, makes the task doable. One measurement of Second Harvest's effectiveness is Forbes magazine's calculation that 98 percent of all product and financial donations go to hungry people, not administration or fund-raising.

In Phoenix in the 1960's after a divorce and other personal problems, Mr. van Hengel was struggling to rebuild his life. One day in 1967, he found himself conversing with a woman who had 10 children and a husband on death row. For all her hardships, she said food was no problem.

As Mr. van Hengel later recounted, the woman explained that she shopped in refuse bins at the rear of a nearby grocery store. Mr. van Hengel went to the bins and found frozen food that was still frozen and edible, loose carrots and stale bread.

"The woman had healthy kids who obviously didn't eat bad at all," he said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1992.

Mr. van Hengel then visited the store manager and in a back room found other things being thrown out. A case of ketchup with one broken bottle was tossed. So were cans with dents.

Mr. van Hengel, who had recently been moved by a documentary about hunger in Africa, asked if he could have the discarded items. The answer was yes, as it was with other stores.

A man searching for purpose had found one.

"It's amazing how many people are being fed because of this crazy little thing we started," Mr. van Hengel told The Times. (His "we" referred to a grandmother and two disabled volunteers, then his only helpers.)

"We're feeding millions, and it's not costing anyone anything," he continued. "But it scares me to look back because I just had no idea it would grow into this."

John van Hengel was born in Waupun, Wis., the son of a nurse and the town's pharmacist. After graduating from Lawrence College with a government degree, he moved to Southern California and became a self-described "first-rate beach bum."

He grew more focused, and studied broadcasting at the University of California, Los Angeles. His jobs included driving a beer truck in Beverly Hills, designing plastic rainwear, being a sales manager for an archery company and working as a magazine publicist.

He married a model, and when she divorced him in 1960, he felt crushed. He returned to Wisconsin, where he worked in a limestone quarry for $1.50 an hour. His legs were partly paralyzed in a barroom fight, and a doctor sent him to neurology hospital in Phoenix.

A lifelong Roman Catholic, he got a job at the Immaculate Heart Church in Phoenix driving the bus, coaching sports and helping out in the busy soup kitchen. On his own, he bought a broken-down milk truck to pick up surplus citrus fruit to give to charity missions.

The parish council of St. Mary's Church gave him an abandoned bakery to store his citrus, as well as $3,000. When he met the women who shopped in supermarket trash, he already had the beginnings of an infrastructure.

That woman came up with the name "food bank." The first year, Mr. van Hengel, who outfitted himself at thrift shops, and his three helpers at St. Mary's collected and distributed 250,000 pounds of food. Soon, they had enlisted manufacturers and wholesalers and were handling things like 200 semitruckloads of surplus grapefruit juice.

In 1971, they started giving out Emergency Food Boxes, which contained balanced foods for nine meals for families who ran out of food between paychecks.

Five years later, Mr. van Hengel established Second Harvest with a federal grant. The name came from the biblical story of Ruth, who gleaned grain left by reapers.

In 1983, Mr. van Hengel left Second Harvest to spread food-banking to Canada and Europe. Three years later, he set up a food-bank consulting firm, devoting more and more of his time to initiatives in South America and Africa, where hunger had first alarmed him.

Mr. van Hengel is survived by two sons, Thomas, of Scottsdale, Ariz., and John, of Kansas City, Kan.

Drawing on Jesus' words about the poor, the motto of Mr. van Hengel's initial soup kitchen sums up his life's mission: "The poor we shall always have with us. But why the hungry?"

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2005

August Wilson

October 3, 2005
August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
August Wilson, who chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century in a series of plays that will stand as a landmark in the history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway theater, died yesterday at a hospital in Seattle. He was 60 and lived in Seattle.

The cause was liver cancer, said his assistant, Dena Levitin. Mr. Wilson's cancer was diagnosed in the summer, and his illness was made public last month.

"Radio Golf," the last of the 10 plays that constitute Mr. Wilson's majestic theatrical cycle, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater last spring and has subsequently been produced in Los Angeles. It was the concluding chapter in a spellbinding story that began more than two decades ago, when Mr. Wilson's play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" had its debut at the same theater, in 1984, and announced the arrival of a major talent, fully matured.

Reviewing the play's Broadway premiere for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that in "Ma Rainey," Mr. Wilson "sends the entire history of black America crashing down upon our heads."

"This play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims," Mr. Rich continued, "and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates."

In the years since "Ma Rainey" appeared, Mr. Wilson collected innumerable accolades for his work, including seven New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award, for 1987's "Fences," and two Pulitzer Prizes, for "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," from 1990.

"He was a giant figure in American theater," the playwright Tony Kushner said yesterday. "Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story.

"The playwright's voice in American culture is perceived as having been usurped by television and film, but he reasserted the power of drama to describe large social forces, to explore the meaning of an entire people's experience in American history. For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned."

To honor his achievements, Broadway's Virginia Theater is to be renamed the August Wilson Theater. The new marquee is to be unveiled Oct. 17.

With the exceptions of "Radio Golf" and "Jitney," a play first produced in St. Paul in 1981 and reworked and presented Off Broadway in 2000, all of the plays in the cycle were ultimately seen on Broadway, the sometimes treacherous but all-important commercial marketplace for American theater. Although some were not financial successes there, "Fences," which starred James Earl Jones, set a record for a nonmusical Broadway production when it grossed $11 million in a single year, and ran for 525 performances. Together, Mr. Wilson's plays logged nearly 1,800 performances on Broadway in a little more than two decades, and they have been seen in more than 2,000 separate productions, amateur and professional.

Each of the plays in the cycle was set in a different decade of the 20th century, and all but "Ma Rainey" took place in the impoverished but vibrant African-American Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Wilson was born. In 1978, before he had become a successful writer, Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul, and in 1994 he settled in Seattle, where he died. But his spiritual home remained the rough streets of the Hill District, where as a young man he sat in thrall to the voices of African-American working men and women. Years later, he would discern in their stories, their jokes and their squabbles the raw material for an art that would celebrate the sustaining richness of the black American experience, bruising as it often was.

In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.

In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power of the blues, he also argued eloquently for the importance of black Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was imperative for black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing fight against the legacies of white racism.

In an article about his cycle for The Times in 2000, Mr. Wilson wrote, "I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves."

Mr. Wilson did not establish the chronological framework of his cycle until after the work had begun, and he skipped around in time. Although "Radio Golf," the last play to be written, was set in the 1990's, "Gem of the Ocean," which immediately preceded it in production (it came to Broadway in the fall of 2004), was set in the first decade of the 20th century.

His first success, "Ma Rainey," which took place in a Chicago recording studio in 1927, depicted the turbulent relationship between a rich but angry blues singer and a brilliant trumpet player who also wants to succeed in the white-dominated world of commercial music. From there Mr. Wilson turned to the 1950's, with "Fences," his most popular play, about a garbageman and former baseball player in the Negro leagues who clashes with his son over the boy's intention to pursue a career in sports. His next play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," considered by many to be the finest of his works, was a quasi-mystical drama set in a boardinghouse in 1911. It told of a man newly freed from illegal servitude searching to find the woman who abandoned him.

The other plays in Mr. Wilson's theatrical opus are "The Piano Lesson," set in 1936, in which a brother and sister argue over the fate of the piano that symbolizes the family's anguished past history; "Two Trains Running," concerning an ex-con re-ordering his life in 1969; "Seven Guitars," about a blues musician on the brink of a career breakthrough in 1948; "Jitney," a collage of the everyday doings at a gypsy cab company in 1977; and "King Hedley II," in which another troubled ex-con searches for redemption as the Hill District crumbles under the onslaught of Reaganomics in 1985.

As the cycle developed, Mr. Wilson knit the plays together through overlapping themes and characters. Many of the primary conflicts concern the dueling prerogatives of characters poised between the traumatizing past and the uncertain future. The central character in "Radio Golf" is the grandson of a character in "Gem of the Ocean." The guiding spirit of the cycle came to be Aunt Esther, a woman said to have lived for more than three centuries, who was referred to in several plays and who appeared at last in "Gem." She embodied the continuity of spiritual and moral values that Mr. Wilson felt was crucial to the black experience, uniting the descendants of slaves to their African ancestors.

A Fruitful Partnership

Mr. Wilson's career was closely linked with that of Lloyd Richards, who became the first black director to work on Broadway when he staged the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun," in 1959. Ms. Hansberry's warmhearted but clear-eyed play about the struggles of a black family to move up the economic ladder in Chicago shares with Mr. Wilson's work a focus on the daily lives of black Americans, relegating the oppressions of white culture to the background.

Mr. Richards, the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater from 1979 to 1991, was also the head of the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut when Mr. Wilson submitted "Ma Rainey" to the program. ("Jitney," begun in 1979, had been submitted and rejected twice.) When it was accepted, Mr. Richards helped refine the work of the then-unknown writer and first produced and directed it at Yale Rep, where its success instantly established Mr. Wilson as an American playwright of singular talent, perhaps the greatest American stage poet since Tennessee Williams.

Mr. Richards would help shape and direct the next five plays in Mr. Wilson's cycle, ending with "Seven Guitars," which arrived on Broadway in 1996. Each play was refined through a series of productions at Yale and other regional theaters before moving to New York. (Most grew significantly shorter along the way: Mr. Wilson's work was most often criticized for excessive length and sometimes belaboring its ideas. In a celebratory review Mr. Rich wrote when "Joe Turner" opened on Broadway, he nevertheless noted, "As usual with Mr. Wilson, the play overstates its thematic exposition in an overlong first act.")

This formula replicated in a noncommercial arena the tryout circuit that had once been commonplace for plays aiming for Broadway, a method of development that ran aground as the costs of theater skyrocketed. The process, which also involved Mr. Wilson's longtime producer, Benjamin Mordecai, the managing director of Yale Rep during much of Mr. Richards's tenure, was important in defining a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship between the country's not-for-profit regional theaters and its Broadway-centered commercial establishment. (Mr. Mordecai, who was involved with all of Mr. Wilson's plays in one capacity or another, died earlier this year.) More significantly, the collaboration between Mr. Richards and Mr. Wilson was the most artistically fruitful in American theatrical history since Elia Kazan's association with Arthur Miller and Williams.

An Atypical Education

Mr. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh. He was named for his father, a white German immigrant who worked as a baker, drank too much and had a fiery temperament his son would inherit. He was mostly an absence in Mr. Wilson's childhood, and it was his African-American mother, Daisy Wilson, who instilled in her six children a strong sense of pride and a limited tolerance for injustice. (She once turned down a washing machine she had won in a contest when the company sponsoring the event tried to fob off a secondhand item on her.) Mr. Wilson legally adopted her last name when he set out to become a writer.

Eventually Mrs. Wilson divorced Mr. Wilson's father and remarried, and the family moved to a largely white suburb. As the only black student in his class at a Roman Catholic high school, Mr. Wilson gained an awareness of the grinding ugliness of racism that would inform his work. "There was a note on my desk every single day," he told The New Yorker in 2001. "It said, 'Go home, nigger.' " Mr. Wilson attended two more schools but gave up on formal education when a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. At 15, he chose to continue - but essentially to begin - his education on his own, spending his days at the local library absorbing books by the dozen.

Mr. Wilson acquired an equally valuable education outside the library walls, hanging out and listening to the Hill District denizens pass the time on stoops, in coffee shops and at Pat's Place, a local cigar store. Eventually the voices he absorbed while hanging loose with retirees and sharpies in his 20's would re-emerge in his plays, sometimes with little artistic tampering.

Mr. Wilson acquired his first typewriter with $20 he had earned writing a term paper for one of his sisters at college. But he preferred to write in public places like bars and restaurants and had a particular affinity for composing on cocktail napkins. Only when he settled into his career as a playwright did he become comfortable writing at home, in longhand on yellow notepads.

By the time he was 20, Mr. Wilson had decided he was a poet. He submitted poems to Harper's and other magazines while supporting himself with odd jobs, and began dressing in a style that raised eyebrows among his peers. While most of the young men of the time were dressing down, Mr. Wilson was always meticulously turned out in jackets, ties and white shirts selected from thrift shops. Later he would be known for his trademark porter's cap.

Inspired by the Black Power movement then gaining momentum, Mr. Wilson and a group of fellow poets founded a theater workshop and an art gallery, and in 1968 Mr. Wilson and his friend Rob Penny founded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theater. Mr. Wilson was the director and sometimes an actor, too, although he had no experience, and learned about directing by checking a how-to manual out of the library. The company was without a performance space and staged shows in the auditoriums of local elementary schools. Tickets were sold, for 50 cents a pop, by chatting up people on the streets right before a performance.

But Mr. Wilson's aspirations as an author were still being channeled into poetry; after an abortive effort to write a play for his theater, he set aside playwriting for almost a decade. He came home to drama almost by happenstance. Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul in 1978 and started working at the Science Museum of Minnesota. His task: adapting Native American folk tales into children's plays.

Homesick for the Hill District and growing more comfortable with the playwriting process, he started channeling the Hill voices haunting his memories as a way of keeping the connection alive. "Jitney," begun in 1979, was the result. It was produced in Pittsburgh in 1982, the same year that "Ma Rainey" was accepted at the O'Neill Center. (Mr. Wilson's first professional production was of a prior play adapted from a series of his poems, "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," staged by St. Paul's Penumbra Theater.)

In a 1999 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Wilson cited his major influences as being the "four B's": the blues was the "primary" influence, followed by Jorge Luis Borges, the playwright Amiri Baraka and the painter Romare Bearden. He analyzed the elements each contributed to his art: "From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality." He added two more B's, both African-American writers, to the list: the playwright Ed Bullins and James Baldwin.

Although his plays achieved their success in the white-dominated theater world, Mr. Wilson remained devoted to the alternative culture of black Americans and mourned its gradual decline as the black middle class grew and adopted the values of its white counterpart. He once lamented that at convocation ceremonies at black universities, the music would be Bach, not gospel.

When a Hollywood studio optioned "Fences," Mr. Wilson caused a ruckus by insisting on a black director. In a 1990 article published in Spin magazine and later excerpted in The Times, he said, "I am not carrying a banner for black directors. I think they should carry their own. I am not trying to get work for black directors. I am trying to get the film of my play made in the best possible way. I declined a white director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans." (The film was not made.)

He was a firm believer in the importance of maintaining a robust black theater movement, a viewpoint that also inspired a public controversy when Mr. Wilson clashed with the prominent theater critic and arts administrator Robert Brustein in a series of exchanges in the pages of American Theater magazine and The New Republic, and later in a formal debate between the two staged at Manhattan's Town Hall in 1997, moderated by Anna Deavere Smith.

The contretemps began when Mr. Wilson delivered a keynote address to a national theater conference in which he lamented that among the more than 60 members of the League of Regional Theaters, only one was dedicated to the work of African-Americans. He also denounced as absurd the idea of colorblind casting, asserting that an all-black "Death of a Salesman" was irrelevant because the play was "conceived for white actors as an investigation of the specifics of white culture." Mr. Brustein referred to Mr. Wilson's call for an independent black theater movement as "self-segregation."

At the sold-out debate at Town Hall the friendly antagonists essentially restated their positions publicly. "Never is it suggested that playwrights like David Mamet or Terrence McNally are limiting themselves to whiteness," Mr. Wilson said. "The idea that we are trying to escape from the ghetto of black culture is insulting."

A Legacy of Stars

Mr. Wilson was dedicated to writing for the theater, and resisted many offers from Hollywood. (His only concession: adapting "The Piano Lesson" for television.) He didn't even see any movies for a stretch of 10 years.

But the list of well-known television and film actors who first came to prominence in one of Mr. Wilson's plays is lengthy. Charles S. Dutton scored his first success as the trumpeter Levee in the original production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a role he reprised nearly 20 years later when the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, with Whoopi Goldberg in the title role. S. Epatha Merkerson, now known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on "Law & Order," appeared opposite Mr. Dutton in "The Piano Lesson" on Broadway.

Other notable actors who appeared in one or more of Mr. Wilson's plays include Angela Bassett, Roscoe Lee Browne, Phylicia Rashad, Courtney B. Vance, Laurence Fishburne, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Keith David, Viola Davis, Delroy Lindo, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Mr. Wilson's first two marriages, to Brenda Burton and Judy Oliver, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Constanza Romero, a Colombian-born costume designer he met when she worked on "The Piano Lesson"; and two daughters, Sakina Ansari (from his first marriage) and Azula Carmen Wilson (from his third). He is also survived by his siblings Freda Ellis, Linda Jean Kittel, Richard Kittel, Donna Conley and Edwin Kittel.

Mr. Wilson did not write plays with specific political agendas, but he did believe art could subtly effect social change. And while his essential aim was to evoke and ennoble the collective African-American experience, he also believed his work could help rewrite some of those rules.

"I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans," he told The Paris Review. "For instance, in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things - love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives."

In describing his own work, Mr. Wilson could be analytical or offhand. A soft-spoken man whose affability masked a sometimes short temper, he was a connoisseur of the art of storytelling offstage and on. Here's the story behind all his characters' stories, in his own words: "I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. I'm not sure what it means, other than life is hard."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2005

Justice Policy Institute: Fact Sheet: Ganging Up on Crime

FACT SHEET: Ganging Up on Crime

April 11th, 2005


JPI FACT SHEET

Ganging Up on Crime?
Putting Gang/Crime Statistics in Context

“Gangs have declared war on our nation. They are ravaging our communities like cancer-urban, rural, rich and poor – and they are metastasizing from one community to the next as they grow”-Congressman J. Randy Forbes, Fourth District of Virginia (April 5, 2005)
---In the state of Virginia between 2003 and 1993 violent crime dropped by 25% declining from 24,160 to 18,115[i].

“One-third of individuals under the age of 18 are now members of gangs, according to the Department of Justice.” --Bush Declares War on Rising Youth Gang Violence (April 7, 2005), Brandee J. Tecson, MTV.Com
---If this were correct then 24,211,474[ii] youth aged 18 and younger would be in gangs, a figure not substantiated by crime data or what we know about gang crime.

Crime, and Cuts in Context: Some neighborhoods in the United States continue to experience unacceptable rates of violent crime. While Congressional sponsors caution “gangs are an ever-present and growing problem,” the leading indicators of crime in the United States show that the historic crime drop witnessed in the 1990s continues in most parts of the country. Both adult crime and youth crime fell throughout 2003, and mid-year 2004 — the latest years of consistent and available data from the justice department. But while most gang experts call for an appropriate social service response to youth development and neighborhoods in distress, this administration and Congress support huge cuts to programs that serve youth. These cuts and punitive provisions in the HR. 1279 The Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act are likely to do more to destabilize communities and aggravate crime than promote public safety.

The leading national indicators suggest that crime is far from growing or surging.

Serious adult crime has fallen. The latest crime survey from the FBI’s Uniform Crime reporting program examines the first six months of 2004. Compared to the first six months of 2003, violent crime fell 2% in 2004, and the number of homicides fell by 5.7%. The drop in violent crime and homicides over the one-year period was the biggest drop recorded since 2001, which came after the historic drop in crime of the 1990s.[iii] Violent crime, adult and juvenile, fell by 28% from 1993 to 2003; 1,926,017 and 1,381259 respectively.[iv] Homicides declined at similar rate of 33% from 1993 to 2003; 24,536 and 16,503 respectively. [v] In recent years from 2001 to 2003, during the so-called surge in gang violence, youth homicides declined by 3%

Serious youth crime has fallen. The latest crime survey from the FBI’s Uniform Crime reporting program breaks down the age of people arrested for serious offenses in 2003. The number of people under 18 arrested for homicide declined 30%. Between 1993-2003, youth homicide arrests declined by 75%.[vi] Youth violent crime fell by 46% from 1993 to 2003.[vii]

Serious Gang Crime in Context: While many communities do experience unacceptable levels of serious crime, including gang crime, our measures of serious gang violence do not tell us that the problem is “ravaging” all our communities. In 2002, gang homicides represented 7% of the known circumstances in which homicides occurred. Four times as many homicide victims were killed in relation to an “argument” than a gang.[viii]
“It is easy to underestimate the grip that gangs have on some of our cities. But the sad reality is that their grip on urban life is lethal.”

—United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Northern District of Illinois-Chicago Area (April 5, 2005)

Serious crime has fallen in most cities. Even in cities where law enforcement says there are “super-gangs,” the latest federal surveys show crime on the decline. Compared to the first six months in 2003[ix], the number of homicide arrests fell by 25% in Chicago in 2004, robbery arrests fell by 7%, and property crime fell by 4%.

This administration proposes cuts to programs that serve young people and communities in distress.

Juvenile prevention programs, such as the Juvenile Accountability Block Grant (JABG), will be zeroed out in this administration’s budget.
Child and Family Services, which include Head Start and services for Abused and Neglected Children, will be cut by 3.3 billion dollars in the next four years under President Bush’s budget.[x]
Elementary and Secondary education will be cut by upwards of 11 billion dollars in the four years.[xi]
Vocational and Adult education will be cut by 5.8 billion in the next four years.[xii]
FACT: Imprisoning more young people as adults, increases crime.
HR 1279 proposes to change the federal juvenile justice system to authorize prosecution of 16 and 17 year old gang members who commit violent crimes. Research[xiii] conclusively shows that prosecuting young people as adults does not reduce youth crime. Research shows that young people prosecuted as adults, in comparison to youth held in juvenile facilities, are more likely to:
commit a greater number of crimes upon release
commit violent crimes upon release
commit crimes sooner upon release.
FACT: Punitive rhetoric distracts from real problems.

· Inciting fears and promising to crack down on mythical threats does not serve the public. Gangs are a symptom of social distress and HR 1279 is ill equipped to address the underpinnings of crime in a productive manner.



JPI

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