Monroe Anderson

TBT--The Black Art Market

Monroe Anderson's Common Ground_ Black Art from Monroe Andeson on Vimeo.

 

Throw Back Thursday

May 1991

 

The week before the South Side Community Art Center's annual auction, I did this Common Ground show on black art suddenly become collectible. My guests were Philip Schiller, an art collector, Joe Clark, a gallery owner, Marva Pitchford Jolly, an artist and Herbert Nipson, the president of the South Side Community Art Center.

btw, Nipson was also the Executive Editor of Ebony Magazine and my old boss from 1972-74.

 

 

Blacks taxed in more ways than one

 

    Chicago police have set up a disproportionate amount of sobriety checkpoints in the black community. They also stopped and frisked the city's black residents at an alarming rate. This is just a couple of ways blacks Americans are burdened more than whites. But there is also an unfair economic burden...a Black Tax. Here's my Chicago Defender column on the subject.

 

The Black Tax toll is both big and small

By Monroe Anderson

 

Racism is so deeply embedded and routine in America that for many whites it’s nothing more than business as usual. For African Americans, however, racial discrimination exacts a toll, from being over-policed to being undervalued.

             When the Chicago police decided to crack down on DUI violations and feed the city coffers with extra violation fines, they set up shop in the Black community. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that 84 percent of roadside sobriety checks were in African American or Hispanic police districts. The newspaper reported Sunday that between February 2010 and June 2014 Chicago police staged DUI checkpoints at 127 out of 152 in the city’s predominantly minority neighborhoods while fewer than four percent were in majority-white police districts--even though that is where one out of four of Chicago’s alcohol-related accidents and deaths occurred.

 Chicago police also conducted a quarter of a million “stop-and-frisk” searches during the summer of 2014 that did not lead to an arrest, according to a finding by the American Civil Liberty Union of Illinois. Although Blacks represent less than a third of Chicago’s population, we were close to three-fourths of the stops.

 In white neighborhoods, Blacks instantly became the usual suspects. In Jefferson Park, which is just one percent African American, we were 15 percent of all the stop-and-frisks. In the Near North District, where Blacks are less than 10 percent of the population, we were 60 percent of those stopped by Chicago police.

Police targeting Blacks is small change compared to some of the other ways African Americans in Chicago have been burdened with separate and unequal treatment.

Back when I was a Chicago Tribune reporter, I pitched the editors on our doing an investigative series we titled, after what it was called in the community, “The Black Tax.”

Our 1980 investigation uncovered a not-so-subtle but very real practice of economic discrimination: Blacks pay more to get less.  We sought out bungalows on the city’s South and North sides that were virtually identical in appearance. We documented the fact that those owning the houses in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods paid as much as 80 percent more for home insurance than those owning bungalows in the city’s white neighborhoods.

We documented that car insurance cost more on the Black side of town than it did on the white side and that it was far more difficult to get home improvement loans in one neighborhood compared to the other for a reason. “Millions of dollars deposited by minority group members in most of their community banks and savings and loan associations have flowed to home loans in distant suburbs and only a few thousand dollars has been retained for neighborhood mortgage,” we reported.

We also discovered that living on the wrong side of Western Avenue, which served as a racial dividing line, came with a price tag of its own. The homeowners in the predominantly Black neighborhoods east of Western had 25 times as many Illinois FAIR Plan policies as the whites on the west side of the avenue. For those who are not homeowners or who are lucky enough to be insured by the likes of State Farm or Allstate, with the FAIR Plan, you pay higher rates for less coverage.

Over a lifetime, this Black Tax adds up to jaw-dropping inequities. White Americans have 13 times the net worth of Black Americans. In 2013, white household wealth was $141,900 while the net worth of the Black household was just $11,000. That’s without even factoring in job hiring and wage discrimination.

             In some ways, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been an equal opportunity taxer. He has exacted hidden taxes on Chicago’s Blacks and whites by jacking up water and sewer fees and vehicle sticker fees. He has also raised cable TV amusement taxes by $28.80 a year and 911 taxes on land line and cell phones by $16.80 a year.

The DUI checkpoints and police stops and frisks demonstrate that, in other ways, the mayor plays favorites.

It’s time for all those Black Chicagoans who, for whatever reasons, believed that Mayor Emanuel was their man to remind him that he owes them. They need to go tell the mayor that they want their just due.

I’m not talking about anything so grand as the $20 million he’s forking over to the Jon Burge torture victims. I’m thinking modest. How about he tells his police to quit stopping Blacks and browns on the streets or in checkpoints while focusing the color of their skin before fairly considering content of the character?

It should be a non-taxing thing to do for the mayor who says he knows how to get things done.

Mayor 1% takes on a community organizer

 

 The first of three Chicago runoff mayoral election debates took place Monday night. Rahm Emanuel outperformed his challenger, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. But there are two debates in a little over two weeks before we'll know who's the last man standing. Here's my Chicago Defender column.

 

Chuy win over Rahm still debatable

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

Jesus “Chuy” Garcia had to do just one thing during Monday night’s first mayoral debate: Channel his inner Harold Washington to show Rahm Emanuel and the rest of Chicago who was the boss.

       Mission unaccomplished.

       Garcia came off as the man who would be mayor. Emanuel came off as the mayor.

      In a testy verbal battle between Commissioner Congeniality and Mayor Meany, both men made valiant efforts to go against type. It was obvious that Emanuel was working hard at being more likeable. It was just as apparent that Garcia was attempting to be No Mas Mr. Nice Guy.  At the same time, each man was out to typecast the other.

Without name calling, Garcia, the community organizer, reminded voters why there is a book out there entitled, Mayor 1%.

“Chicagoans need to know that this mayor has provided corporate welfare to his cronies, millionaires and billionaires, in Illinois in terms of tax increment financing and that he promised four years ago to put Chicago’s fiscal house in order,” Garcia said.  “We’re in a financial free fall. The city has been downgraded, three of its agencies over the past two weeks, to near junk bond status.”

Cook County Commissioner Garcia charged that while “trying to talk in a sophisticated way,” the mayor wasn’t saying anything that would help any Chicagoan who wasn’t physically or professionally in the Loop.

Mayor Emanuel, chum to the corporations, was far smoother than Garcia but just as combative while sticking to the story in his TV attack ads charging that his runoff challenger is all Windy City planner with no specifics on how he intended to get things done.          

The mayor even threw in a short lecture. “The difference between being a legislator,” said Rahm, once a Congressman, to Chuy, once a state senator, is “you pass a bill. When you’re the mayor, you have to pay the bills.”

Throughout the hour-long debate the mayor stuck it to Garcia for not being specific while glued to talking points that sounded more specific than they actually were.  Neither candidate has presented a scenario that would hoist Chicago out of the deep financial hole that 20 plus years of Mayor Richard M. Daley dug for the city. Garcia wouldn’t say whether he will or will not raise property taxes. Emanuel who once said that property taxes were the last resort, now says they’re off the table.

The mayor has let his $15 million war chest do the talking. A constant barrage of TV ads telling Chicagoans that Garcia hasn’t a clue and others, with the mayor in a Mr. Rogers sweater explaining that while he may be a jerk, he’s our jerk appear to be working. An Ogden and Fry poll Saturday showed Emanuel at 47.1 percent, compared to Garcia’s 37.6 percent. A Chicago Tribune poll released the day before reported Emanuel at 51 percent and Garcia at 37 percent with 11 percent undecided.

In order for the mayor to win another term all that may be required for the next 20 days is for him to keep up the attack ads while playing nice. Saturday’s endorsement by the powerful Service Employees International Union should deliver Garcia more money and an army of campaign workers but he’ll still have to throw more elbows.

The mayoral challenger needs to rally the old Harold Washington coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and progressive whites. But more than anything else, Garcia will need to get out the Black vote.

To do that, he needs to hold news conferences in front of one or two of the 50 closed neighborhood schools. While at one of them he needs to point out that Emanuel’s closing of the six mental health clinics was just one more blow to the same low-income neighborhoods impacted by the school closings. He needs to talk about how, as with the parking meters under Daley, Emanuel has privatize the CTA fare system, thus killing another of the city’s geese that should lay the taxpayers golden eggs.

Garcia needs to emphasize and re-emphasize that unlike Mayor Washington, Mayor Emanuel has not been not fairer than fair while waving the Chicago Sun-Times report that whites continue to dominate the city’s highest paying jobs at City Hall and throughout city government. Among Chicago’s 32,500 city employees, 46 percent are white, 31.8 percent are Black, 18 percent Hispanic and fewer than three percent Asian.

      These are the specifics Garcia should be addressing, not suggesting improbable fixes to what is nearly an impossible problem--pulling a $9 billion rabbit out of the hat.     He’ll get a second chance next Thursday at the second mayoral runoff debate.

  

 

White House blackout peeves some black columnists

    I was a columnist at a major American newspaper nine years before three black East Coast columnists brought "the idea that a group of black columnists would come together to share our common experience and probe the soft underbelly of our craft" to fruition in 1992.

By the time these three men had formed The Trotter Group, I was no longer writing a signed, op-ed column for the Chicago Tribune but had moved on to a post as a department head at WBBM-TV and the executive director and host of Common Ground, a public affairs TV talk show. 

Five years ago, I was back in print, writing a signed, op-ed page column for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was during that time that I became a member of The Trotter Group.

I've gone into my ancient history because of current events that are still unfolding. 

Ten members of The Trotter Group met in the White House with President Barack Obama and other key staff a few days ago. I only learned of the meeting after fellow Trotter, Robin Washington, the editor and a columnist at the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune--with whom Obama spent a better part of a day for an interview 20 years ago, even cutting class at Harvard Law--sent me an angry Facebook message questioning how certain Trotters were selected to attend the meeting and others were not. While I didn't receive an invitation at all, other Trotters were invited then dis-invited. As a result, travel plans had to be changed and there was considerable explaining to do to the editors who had signed off on the trips to the White House.

So far, the aftermath has fallen just short of that old axiom: Hell has no fury like a columnist scorned. But just barely.

There has been a flurry of emails between Trotters criticizing the selection process. Trotter member Faye Anderson (no relation), didn't write about it on her blog, Anderson@Large but did discuss it on her Facebook page. Under the headline, Did White House Decide Who Represents Trotter Group?, Trotter member Richard Prince brought the controversy to light in his Journal-isms column.

And, of course, I've just written about it, here, on my political blog. This may be the end of the story. Then again, it may not be.

We'll see.

Everlasting memories of a great father

 

I've spent the last 25 Fathers Days without. By now, I thought I'd be over my father's death. I'm not. It's no longer the ever present pain as it was back then but every now and then, his lost haunts me. And always on Fathers Day I remember and wonder what it would be like if he was still here. I've written about him more than once, I posted a Chicago Tribune column last year that I wrote shortly after his death.

  This Fathers Day, I'm posting a Chicago Sun-Times column I wrote three years ago. 

What happens to children without father's example?

Chicago Sun-Times

June 18, 2006

BY MONROE ANDERSON

My earliest memory of my father, Monroe Anderson, dates back to when I was three. On a pre-dawn winter morning, I stood in my flannel pajamas, watching him stoke the coals in our apartment’s pot belly stove until there was a golden glow bathing the room. My last memory of my father, alive, was in1984 at a New Year’s Day family dinner in the Gary house where I grew up. Dishes were being cleared from the table when my father vanished, returning with a vintage shotgun cradled in his arms

      “I want you to have this,” he said, handing it over, barrels up.

      The shotgun meant a lot to him. When he was a boy living down South, his maternal granddaddy used it while teaching him to hunt for supper. Thinking it was a strange gesture, I thanked him, as I took the 12 gauge.

      Eight days later, my father was dead at 61, the victim of a massive heart attack. To this day, those first and last images remain burned into my mind’s eye, capturing the core of what my father meant to me. He was light and warmth and protector and provider.

      He made it all so easy for me, while it hadn’t been easy at all for him.

      My father’s father, yet another Monroe Anderson, was a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta.  About eight decades ago, a tornado uprooted my father’s family’s tenant shanty. The bodies of his father, his mother and his six-year-old sister were found in the storm-ravaged fields my grandparents had worked. As the rescue and recovery team plowed through the fields, heaping one corpse after the other on its horse-drawn cart, my father, then a one-year-old baby, was found lying face down in a furrow. Just as they were about to stack his tiny body with the others, he shuddered. He was raised by his grandmother and two young aunts, always wanting and always missing the family he never knew.

      By the time he was 16, armed with just an eight-grade education, he was on his own. He migrated North, first to Chicago, then to Gary, to improve his lot. Shortly after he was drafted into the army during World War II, he and my mother, Norma, would elope; their marriage would last for 42 years, ‘til death they did part. The war ended and  I was born a year after my father was honorably discharged.  My sister followed five years later and my brother came six years after her.

      While my father worked in the steel mills for most of his life, his real job was family man. He was the house handyman and the family chauffeur.  He was a man with traditional values who cherished his position as head of household, but also a man ahead of his time. He routinely relieved my homemaker mother from the daily drudgery of cooking and house cleaning. 

      From time to time, I think about my father, wondering how different I’d have been had he not always been there, showing me how to be a man, demonstrating how to be a father. I wonder what his reaction would be to this “my baby’s daddy” era when too many fathers are casual acquaintances to their children when not absent or non-existent.  In our modern times, one third of our children are raised without the biological father present. In African American households, it’s twice as bad because the percentage is twice as high. How much better would life be for these children if they had  fathers present and committed?

      When my father died, I thought of myself as having lost a best friend, mentor and role model but as time has passed and I’ve raised two sons of my own, I’ve come to realize that my loss was theirs as well. My father as their grandfather would have made my sons’ lives that much richer. 

      A great father is hard to forget. So I know how lucky I am that he was there for me to remember this father’s day and every other day. 

My bittersweet Memorial Day memory of Leanita McClain

    Twenty five years ago today, I discovered that Leanita McClain, my friend and colleague, was dead. It was a suicide that came as no surprise to me. For more hours than I care to remember, I sat in her office at the Chicago Tribune joking, cajoling and questioning her repeated proclamation that she was going to kill herself.

    During these discussions, I'd asked why. "There are black women who'd give their right arm to be where you are," I'd argue.

    "But, I'm not happy," she'd counter.

    Although a young 32, Leanita was the first black and second woman on the editorial board at the Trib. She had her own signed op-ed page Perspective column and a loyal following of readers. She'd written a My Turn piece for Newsweek magazine, about the complications of being a middle class black, that launched her star as a journalist. Her 1983 freelance commentary for the Washington Post, "How Chicago Taught Me to Hate Whites," about the racially polarized mayor's race in Chicago, is a classic. Professionally, she was on top of the world. In the year of her death, she'd been named by Glamour, magazine as one of America's Top 10 career women. 

    None of that seemed to matter. Personally, she was in a lot of pain. She suffered from clinical depression. And, sometime during the Memorial Day weekend, it got the best of her.

    I'd hoped it wouldn't have come to such a tragic end. I'd convinced her to get professional help and nearly convinced myself that the psychiatrist was making a difference. 

    But on that fateful Memorial Day weekend, I knew something was wrong. I hadn't heard from Lea at all over the holiday weekend. This was out of character. For more than a year leading up to her suicide, we talked every day. I'd occasionally get a 3 o'clock in the morning call when she was stressed out.

    That weekend, I didn't hear from her and when I called her home, she didn't answer. The Tuesday after Memorial Day, I dropped by her office only to see it empty, with lights out and newspaper stacked in front of the doors.

    I called Clarence Page, her ex-husband, to see if he'd heard from her. He hadn't. Then I called one of our colleagues who lived in Hyde Park not far from her. Within a couple of hours, he called me with the bad news. She was gone. An overdose of pills.

    Our editor, Jack Fuller, asked me to write my next Perspective column eulogizing her. It was the most difficult piece I've ever written on deadline. At the time, I thought it was far too inadequate. After it ran, many of my readers called or wrote to tell me how much it had moved them.

    This is the first time I've read it in nearly 25 years. It's not as bad as I thought, although it could have been better. I'd like to share my bittersweet Memorial Day memory with you. Here's the column I wrote which ran on Friday, June 1, 1984.

A life cut short, a loss deeply felt

Whenever I had trouble saying what I wanted in a column, Leanita McClain came to my rescue.

"Let me see," Leanita, whose passion was collecting owls, the bird of wisdom, would say. Then she'd give a critical eye to what I'd written. "You're always too hard on yourself. The column's fine."

In short order, with a slight change of a sentence here and a quick word of encouragement there, she'd help me breathe verve into what had been a still life.

I wish she were here to help me with this one. I don't know what I want to say or how I should say whatever I should be saying. I'm not even sure of how I feel except for one thing: a deep loss.

On the day after Memorial Day was observed, the day Leanita, 32, was found in her Hyde Park home, an apparent suicide, I lost a friend, a colleague and a confidante. In addition to being a personal loss for me, Leanita's death was an irreplaceable loss for the profession of journalism and a tragic loss for the voice of reason in Chicago.

Over the last 11 years, both our social and professional lives repeatedly crossed paths as we went through one change after another. Although I first met Leanita at a meeting for black journalists held in the South Side apartment where I lived at the time, our friendship got its start when I left Ebony magazine to come to The Tribune in 1974.

Leanita and my first wife were close friends. Looking back, those days seem so carefree. She and her husband and my wife and I went to restaurants, discos, movies together. We even took a dream vacation to Acapulco together.

As fate would have it, though, it took the deaths of our marriages to change my friendship with Leanita into what if was to become. Leanita, who had been like a sister to my estranged wife, began acting like a mother hen to me.

"Are you eating properly?" she'd ask, by way of looking after my welfare. And that question was just one manifestation of her gentle concern for how I was coping.

Leanita's caring and giving, of course, extended far beyond me. She became involved in such charitable pursuits as tutoring children from the Cabrini-Green public housing project. She helped friends through this or that personal crisis.

At all times, she was concerned about the plight of black journalists in general and those at The Tribune in particular. She'd complain, in her own quiet way, about how few blacks there were in the business, and virtually none in management.

"Are things ever going to really change?" she'd ask during discussions about the lack of black editors at one newspaper, or the problems of a black reporter at another.

Finally, things did change for her. Leanita had worked as a reporter, a copy editor, a picture editor and Perspective editor before going on to become the first black and second woman appointed to The Tribune's editorial board.

As editor of Perspective, a section of opinion and analysis, one of her first acts was to recruit black writers to integrate thought. Her dream, like Dr. Martin Luther King's, was to see the Perspective section, the newsroom, the corporate offices, the city, the state, the nation all integrated. Ironically, many of her critics in recent months unwittingly attacked her as a racist, based on her Washington Post article about white resistance to Harold Washington's election as mayor.

Her writing, whether in the "My Turn" column she did for Newsweek magazine on "The Middle-Class Black's Burden," or her columns in The Tribune, consistently addressed the problems of race relations in this nation with fairness and compassion, offering an idealistic vision of how they might be worked out.

Whenever she came to me with a problem column of her own that she needed my advice on, I'd tell her, "Lea, you're equivocating too much on this one. Choose one side or the other."

Most of the time, though, she'd stick with both views, suggesting a moderating, mediating approach even though neither side seemed to listen.

Ending this was as hard as it was starting it or getting through the middle. If Leanita were around, we might be smoothing out some of the rough edges.

This column was cross-posted on the African American Opinion.com website.

Studs Terkel on OJ Simpson, Coming of Age and Common Ground

 

Studs Terkel and I never were running buddies. We drank together once in 1980 in a hotel bar in Manhattan where we both were attending a national writer's conference. It wasn't a long drinking session. After one round, he apologetically left me for a young blond who hung on his every word better than I could ever hope to do. 

We weren't running buddies after that either. We weren't even "let's do lunch" friends. We'd nod and cordially chat on chance meetings.

But I was an admirer big time of the oral historian. I'd read a couple of his books, caught his radio show from time to time. Even checked him out on the big screen in Eight Men Out. And he knew who I was. He'd read the investigative series I'd worked on at the Chicago Tribune. He'd watched me discuss Harold Washington and the Chicago mayor's race on WTTW-TV's Chicago Week in Review. He'd seen me conduct press conferences as Mayor Eugene Sawyer's press secretary.

So, the day he showed up for a taping on my TV talk show, Common Ground, Studs caught me off guard with an in-my-face grumble.

"Why would they book me on a show that airs at 5:30 on Sunday morning?" Terkel asked the book tour driver who had delivered him to my CBS studio set.

The legendary Chicagoan had been booked to discuss his latest book, Coming of Age. Although I'd only been the executive producer and host of the show for four years, it had been around since the late '60s, born out of racial tensions following the murder of Martin Luther King.

It was understandable that a publishing company would book Studs on the show during a promotion tour. It was a natural. In the short time I'd hosted the show, I'd interviewed Rosa Parks. Carol Mosley Braun was my guest the Sunday before she went on to win the primary election that would lead to her being the first black woman and second black in the U.S. Senate post Reconstruction.

The driver didn't answer Studs' question and right after he'd posed it, my illustrious guest wanted to take it back. "You're cool with me, Monroe. It's just that...."

I nodded. I understood. Depending on who my general manager was and what new program director he happened to be listening to, my show was all over the weekend schedule. During the eight years I hosted Common Ground, the show was in 13 different times slots. My best and my loyal fan couldn't even keep up with its schedule.

"When does your show come on?" she'd ask after the latest time change.

"Mom, it's on at 1 a.m. Sunday," I said, after one of those schedule changes.

Her favorite time had been when it was on at 10:30 a.m. Sunday mornings--sort of. That's when she usually went to church. It was a tough choice but I almost always won out.

This all came back to me recently when I discovered that Studs had donated a video copy of the show we'd done together to Media Burn. Sara Chapman at the independent video archive was good enough to break the show into two 10 minute segments and upload it to YouTube.

Although Studs was on my set to promote his book, there was a major news event we couldn't ignore. We taped right after OJ Simpson had gotten away with murder in the Trial of the Century. So we spent the first half of the show talking about The Juice. In the second half Studs got around to promoting his book. Once the taping was over, he was gave me a hardcover copy of Coming of Age, autographing it with this inscription above his signature: "To Monroe--A delight to be with you--as always, Peace."

Of course, he had commandeered the show.  I wasn't the least bit surprised, he was the veteran host. I was the print journalist playing a talk show host on TV. And, I'm so grateful that all those viewers who weren't up at 5:30 a.m. on that October 1995 Sunday morning can check out my interview with the iconic Chicagoan should they wish.

Will hope black out despair?

When I was in junior high, my speech teacher cited an article in one of the popular periodicals of the time--Look or Life magazine, if memory serves me right--reporting that the Negro was the most motivated American in the nation.

            You can tell how long ago that was by the Negro reference. It was in the early '60s when the Civil Rights movement was producing palatable progress. Dr. Martin Luther King was a force to be reckoned with. Malcolm had not yet been murdered. And many a young Negro who was planning of making something of himself wore his hair closely cropped in what was called a "collegiate." 

            In case you're wondering, the collegiate was identical to the hairstyle President Barack Obama sports now.

            On June 16, 1966, both the hairstyle and the sense that the whole nation was our oyster went out of vogue--as did Dr. King and his nonviolence movement. That was the day Stokely Carmichael, the 25-year-old fiery orator who had replaced John Lewis as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, defined a new social movement in America. In a stirring speech in Greenwood, Mississippi before 3,000 civil rights volunteers who were gathered to protest the shooting of activist James Meredith, Carmichael expressed his anger in a surefire manner.

            "We been saying 'Freedom' for six years," he said, referring to the chant that movement protesters used as they were beaten by hostile policemen pointing water hoses and unleashing vicious attack dogs. "What we are going to start saying now is 'Black Power!' "

            For me, and many other young Black Americans, "Black Power" and the "Black is Beautiful" mantra that followed were psychologically liberating. But, with the murder of Dr. King and the urban uprisings that followed, inner-city Black  America went under siege; most of the businesses that hadn't been burned out shipped out and with them went far too many of the jobs. 

            Racial integration made it possible for educated and motivated Blacks like me to follow the opportunities, leaving those not as fortunate behind. Drugs invaded and occupied the Black community in overwhelming quantities; unrelenting crime and violence followed.

            Soon, for many poor, unskilled Blacks, the only Good Times was a sit-com on TV.

            As a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, each year I'd cover the State of Black Chicago speech given by James Compton, the president of the Chicago Urban League. The list was a long litany of depressing facts dressed up in unrelenting despair. On a couple of occasions, I covered the National Urban League's annual conference when I heard more of the same.

            That's pretty much been the state of things and the outlook for things to come until about a year ago. That, of course, was when it became clear that Barack Obama had a real shot at becoming the POTUS.

Now that we have a Black man in the White House, argues Danielle Belton, on her blog, "The Black Snob," we're in a different era.

Some like Tavis Smiley haven't gotten the message. So Belton takes the radio/TV host to task for partying at his annual "State of the Black Union" gathering--as if it was 1999.

       Rather than taking some the same point of view, Belton says that we may want to look up rather than hang our heads down. Take a look at her blog to see how she sees it.>

            Rants: State Of Emergency

The State of the Black Union concluded in Los Angeles this weekend after the input of various scholars, activists, political leaders and pundits, mixed with the fear of the recession (or depression if you're just talking about black people. Economically things have been nightmarish for African Americans for some time) with the optimism of President Barack Obama's election. 

Founded by author/journalist Tavis Smiley, this was the 10th year for the event where 6,000 people attended panels, networked and discussed the state of the race. 

The funny thing about the state of the race: it's bad. 

Depending on where you live it is either horrific or merely annoying, but bad. Yet the other funny thing about black America is that if you've been hearing a car alarm blare at you for more than 100 hundred years, do you start to not even notice that it's there? Do you begin to think that your maladies are just realities? Do you accept the status quo?

All my life I've watched black people "settle." And when I mean settle, I mean it in many, many forms. Some "settle" for the mediocrity. Some settle for the poverty or violence of their neighborhoods (or the neighborhoods they left and now tut-tut as if fixing the old neighborhood was all the matter of Robert Preston showing up with 76 trombones to blow all the gangbangers away). Some settle for the fact that marriage, stability, peacefulness, happiness, good health, mental stability and intelligence is the property of others, not us, not for you. Things that should be natural rights become "something white folks do."

To read the rest, click here.

Gov. Blago must go-go

   

     Now we know that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is candidate #5 in the Gov. Rod Blagojevich alleged scheme to sell Barack Obama's vacant U.S. senate seat.  The congressman says he is not a suspect and that he made no play to pay. We'll all know what's went down soon enough. Meanwhile, Rep. Jackson says the governor must go. So does President-elect Obama and that's the sentiment of scores of Illinois pols. Here's my observation on my state's golden governor. It was posted this morning on the ebonyjet.com website.

Blagojevich: The Sixth Sense
now it all adds up
December 10, 2008
By Monroe Anderson

In the wake of the arrest of Governor Rod Blagojevich, what has unfolded in Illinois is not unlike the surprise wrap-up in The Sixth Sense: Once the movie ended, everything that had gone before fell into place.
   
As late as November 9, CNN was reporting Barack Obama wanted his close friend Valerie Jarrett appointed to his senate seat.  It's easy to see why.  Jarrett is a wired-Chicago attorney and businesswoman who is one of Michelle and Barack's closest friends. As the co-chair of the transition team, she was the President-elect's first important African American appointment.

But Jarrett's selection to fill his senate seat was not Obama's to make. By Illinois law, it's the governor's decision and his alone.  And by November 11, it was, at best, questionable whether she was Blagojevich's candidate of choice. According to the transcript of a Federal wiretapped conversation between the governor and his chief of staff, John Harris, Blagojevich acknowledged that he knew that Obama wanted Jarrett for the senate seat but "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. F*** them."
   
The next day, Jarrett announced that she was not interested in the senate seat and three days later, Obama announced that she would be a senior White House adviser and assistant for intergovernmental relations.
   
There were a number of other in-retrospect-moments before that.

For the past four years, a double-digit number of associates of the governor have been indicted and convicted and for the past two years, rumors that he was under Federal investigation have been running rampant.  One of Blagojevich's pals was Tony Rezko, the political fundraiser. If the name sounds familiar it's because it was first cited by Hillary Clinton, and later by John McCain and Sarah Palin, to muddy up Obama.

In June, Rezko was convicted of fraud, attempted bribery and money laundering. During his criminal trial, prosecutor's focused on Rezko's corrupting influence on the governor's administration; Obama's name was tangentially mentioned. Sentencing for Rezko was put off from October 28 until January 6, ripe with speculation that he was cutting a deal to give up the gov.

The Obama camp had long ago given up on Blagojevich, keeping him at arm's length to assure that he didn't put their candidate in harm's way. The Illinois governor was not invited to a unity meeting of Democratic Party governors in June in his hometown at the Chicago Historical Museum.
   
Blagojevich was the only Democratic governor who did not speak in July in Denver at the Democratic National Convention. The Illinois governor was also missing-in-action at Obama's victory rally last month in Chicago's Grant Park.
   
Following Blagojevich's early morning bust, Patrick Fitzgerald, United States attorney general for the Northern District of Illinois, held a news conference to put it all in 20-20 hindsight.
   
Describing it as a "political corruption crime spree," Fitzgerald detailed the charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery that led to the arrest of Blagojevich and Harris.  The alleged selling of Obama's vacant senate seat for a promise from a yet unnamed candidate of raising a million dollars in campaign funding will certainly have more political fallout.  Among other competitive contenders for Obama's U.S. senate seat are U.S. representatives Jesse Jackson, Jr., Danny Davis and Luis Gutierrez. Obama's political mentor, Emil Jones, the retiring president of the Illinois state senate, has also expressed an interest in replacing Obama in the nation's upper house.
   
Fitzgerald said that Blagojevich had threatened to not provide state assistance in the selling of the Cubs and Wrigley Field, which is owned by the Tribune Company, unless the owners replaced the newspaper's editorial board members with journalists who would write nice things about him as the governor. Blagojevich also allegedly sought kickbacks in campaign contributions in exchange for an $8 million in state funding for Chicago Memorial Children's Hospital.
   
There's more yet to come.  Fitzgerald is appealing to those who know of other transgressions by the governor to come forward.  All they have to say is "I see corrupt people."

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

Understand this first: Obama is the last one

    When Barack Obama becomes the first President of the United States, African American history will not only be turning a new page or be in need of a new chapter--we'll have to write and read volumes of new books. Here's my personal observation of one way we'll have to reshape our perspective. It's my latest ebonyjet.com post.

I was the first black reporter at the National Observer. 

In the eight years it had been around before I arrived immediately after graduating from Indiana University, the weekly Dow Jones publication was a whites only destination.  Its managing editor let it be known that he was not about to hire anyone black for his newspaper. He had turned down, I was told, a young Bob Teague, who went on to be an award-winning NBC network reporter, and a young William Raspberry, who went on to become the Washington Post’s best-known black columnist.

Months before I was all set to slip on my cap and gown, the conservative ME got his gold watch. His retirement was followed by this pledge from the Observer’s younger editors: they would hire the first qualified black journalist that applied. About that time my resume—highlighting my Newsweek Magazine internship in the summer of 1968—arrived in the mail.

I was with the D.C.-based Observer just shy of two years and during my brief stint, it was just me. There were no other blacks. No other black reporters. No black secretaries. No black pressmen. No black janitors. No black anybody but me. In 1972, I left for Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago, in truth, not because I was black but because I was too green for the job.

After a couple of years of being mentored and challenged at Ebony Magazine, I went to the Chicago Tribune. When Harold Washington became Chicago’s mayor on April 29, 1983, I became the first black reporter to cover City Hall for the Chicago Tribune; make that the first black reporter from any mainstream media newspaper to cover Chicago’s City Hall and city council. The one thing I brought away from both my Observer and Tribune experiences is that it’s not easy being the first black.

At the Observer, I felt as if I had the weight of the race on my shoulders and that any mistake I made would have negative ramifications far beyond me, setting back any opportunity for any other black reporter that might try to follow me. At City Hall, I was the man in the middle of a racial council war as black aldermen were outgunned and outnumbered by white aldermen who were dead set on torpedoing the political agenda of Chicago’s first black mayor. I was second fiddle to an eight-year younger David Axelrod, who had been named the Trib’s political editor and who, more recently, as chief political strategist, brilliantly helped carry Obama to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s not going to be easy for America’s first black president. But that is so obvious and the reasons are so many that a brief discussion couldn’t begin to address them, right now.

It wasn’t easy for Jackie Robinson either. The name-calling and taunts from the baseball fans and the hostilities from the players are history. Since Robinson became the first black major league baseball player 61 years ago, there has been a long and steady stream of first blacks. There was the first black country and western recording star 42 years ago, the first black NFL quarterback 40 years ago, the first black astronaut 29 years ago, the first black Radio City Rockette 20 years ago, the first black governor 18 years ago, and the first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company seven years ago. And, of course, there’s Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods.

No doubt, there will be other Jackie Robinsons, in other fields and professions in America. Someday, there will be the first black executive editor of the New York Times or Washington Post. Someday there will be the first Black baseball commissioner. Someday we’ll see the first head of a major movie studio and the first black owner of a major TV network.

But, while any and all of these future black first accomplishments will be important and welcomed when they finally arrive, what Barack Obama has pulled off dwarfs them all—past, present and future.

He may not have run as the black candidate for president but he is, in reality, symbolically and metaphorically, no less than that. So when he is sworn in as POTUS on January 20, he will officially—and forever—be America’s last first black.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

(Illustration by Kyle F. Anderson)