Monroe Anderson

Black-on-Black crime is KKK

    

    Director Spike Lee will shoot a movie about black-on-black crime this summer in Chicago. The working title is Chiraq. That's Chicago and Iraq truncated into one word. Get it? Here's my Chicago Defender column on what Spike's movie should use as its metaphor.

 

Spike Lee’s Chiraq could be KKK

By Monroe Anderson

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may not care for the title of Spike Lee’s movie slated to start shooting this summer in Englewood, but as an artist, an out-of-towner and a show business man, “Chiraq” makes perfectly good sense for America’s most iconic Black director.

    Popularized by Chief Keef, and other neo-gangster rappers in Chicago’s drill music set, the term Chiraq chronicles the violence in some of the city’s worst poverty pockets. Creating the phrase was a low-brainer, considering that when it comes to body count in Chitown’s most dangerous hoods- Fuller Park, Garfield Park and Englewood--more Blacks have been shot and killed on a year-to-year basis there than in war-torn Iraq.

Beyond that, Spike could certainly use a drive-by box office hit. In nearly a decade, the “Black Woody Allen” hasn’t able to do enough of the right thing to produce a feature film as relevant as director Ava Duvernay’s Selma or as entertaining as director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. A convincing argument could be made that in the past 20 years, the New York--based director has made only one smack down feature film, the 2006 The Inside Man, that can hold its own against his earlier efforts like She’s Got to Have It and Malcolm X.

While he made some memorable documentaries over the years, including 4 Little Girls, and the TV mini-series, When the Levees Broke, Lee’s feature-film efforts, such as Miracle of Saint Anna, Red Hook Summer and Oldboy, had more fizzle than sizzle.    

A modern day Menace II Society might do the trick in reviving Lee’s career but I seriously doubt if Chiraq will do the trick partly because it’s based on a misleading premise.

Contrary to what gets reported on the nightly news or in screaming newspaper headlines, Chicago’s murder rate is on the decline. It’s the lowest it has been in more than four decades. According to rankings made by NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that markets itself as providing “Enterprise-grade data for every neighborhood and city in the U.S.” the Windy City isn’t even on its list of America’s Top 30 murder capitals. Downstate East St. Louis is number one. Two suburbs across state lines, Gary is number three and East Chicago is ranks number 15.

In making another stab at recapturing  the ‘90s when his films’ shocked and awed viewers, Spike may be bringing too little, too late to the reality of Chicago’s Bronzeville, which is already showing signs of turning into D.C. or Harlem. No longer the Chocolate City, gentrification and incoming white flight, the Black population in the District of Columbia has slipped below 50 percent. Nor are Blacks the majority in Harlem anymore.

You can see it unfolding before your very eyes in Bronzeville. The hipsters are salting the South Side. They can be spotted walking their dogs, jogging or pushing their baby strollers on streets their parents and grandparents had either avoided or had forgotten.

You can trace it back to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his not so grand plan to transform Chicago into Paris. It was obvious with the flowers and the fences and the fancy hand operated sidewalk vacuums. It was clandestine with the razing of Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, which diluted the power of the city’s Black voting bloc and exiled the poor to, among other places, Gary, East Chicago and Harvey.

You can see why Chiraq is not the best title for what’s really happening here. So, I’ve got a better suggestion. I think Spike should look at the artwork of visual artist James Pate and either beg, borrow or buy his cutting edge artistic vision. A couple of years ago, Pate had a three-month exhibition at the DuSable Museum. Its title was KKK--Kin Killin Kin.

The detailed black and white drawings, beautiful yet powerful, were of boys from the hood, wearing Ku Klux Klan-like headgear with their black faces exposed or basketball jerseys with the initials KKK on them while pointing guns at each other’s heads. The bullets they fired were artistically frozen just before they entered each other’s heads.

That unnerving reality would make a much more powerful movie than a sequel to the Hughes brothers 1993 hit.

If Spike doesn’t want pursue the KKK metaphor, he can always change his filming location. Killadelphia won’t do because, like Chicago, the City of Brother Love’s murder rate is down.  But Baltimore might work. It has killer cops and urban uprisings right now and, unfortunately, a high enough murder rate: Charm City ranks #13 on the Top Murder Capitols list.

Baltimore, courtesy of The Wire, has a controversial colloquialism just as good as Chiraq. That would be Bodymore, Murdaland.

 

 

Who arrested religion in Indiana?

 

    Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

 

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men.  Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation.  Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

    The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.   

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday  that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

“Clearly. Clearly, there’s been misunderstanding and confusion and mischaracterization of this law,” Gov. Pence said. “I abhor discrimination.”

Right. Don’t stop paying attention yet. Arkansas passed its own religious freedom law yesterday.

It's must-be TV for Blacks in Hollywood

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

 

    Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

    On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

    It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

    The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

    “Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

    Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

    And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

    Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

    Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

    More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

    Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives,  is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

    Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

    More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny.  While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid  $1 million each per episode.

    That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while  glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

     Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

    It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.  

    “We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

    Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

 

For News Corp, there's no business for monkey business

 

      When I was a freshman at Indiana University eons ago, I was a resident in Wright Quad, an all men’s dormitory.  

I'd grown up in a segregated neighborhood in Gary, Indiana.  I’d only had two white teachers during my entire k-12 public school education. I knew no whites socially; for me, they were only characters on TV.

      When I arrived on the idyllic Bloomington campus, where only 600 of the school’s 33,000 students were Black, I had some adjusting to do—as did many of the whites who had grown up in rural Indiana communities where the Ku Klux Klan had thrived a couple of generations earlier and continued to maintain a presence in the mid-60s.

      Our men’s room in our men's dorm was wide open. There was no place to hide. The toilet stalls had no doors. The showerheads were side by side with no petitions between them.      

I hadn’t been in my new home away from home for a week before I picked up on something. The farm boys were stealing peeks at me as I stood under the shower facing the wall.  I casually mentioned this curious behavior to one of the white students who’d befriended me. He explained that the stolen glances were the product of rural legends. Their elders had told the farm boys that Negroes had tails.  They were straining to spot mine.

      I am reminded of this early experience in my college education by the current resurgence on a variation of that theme—Blacks as simians—occurring now.   

      Since the New York Post ran the unfunny, tasteless, racist cartoon—you saw it, the one with a white cop holding a smoking gun as he and his partner stand next to the dead body of a bullet-hole ridden, bloody monkey--the Black man as primate once again has been spoon fed to the public's psyche.

      The NAACP has been fighting this sort of ugly, vicious stereotyping for the past 100 years, and the image assault on Blacks in America was being waged 100 years and more before the venerable civil organization was founded to fight it.

      Rupert Murdock offered an unprecedented personal apology for his newspaper’s offensive cartoon in what amounted to a too little, too late gesture. The NAACP began a full-blown counter offensive today on the media baron’s empire, highlighting how token diversity is throughout News Corp. Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Julian Bond, the chairman, have made a strong argument that the cartoon, captioned, “They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” which ran in juxtaposition to a photograph of Barack Obama signing the legislation, was encouraging the assassination of the POTUS.     

      I’m not convinced inciting murder was the intent of cartoonist Sam Delonas or the New York Post editor who green-lighted the tasteless cartoon. But it’s been eight years since New York’s rightwing rag has had a Black editor in the chain of command that could have red-flagged the chimp cartoon.     

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time Obama has magically morphed into a monkey. Last May, a Georgia barkeeper sold T-shirts with a picture of Curious George and Obama 08 printed on them. But simple-minded stereotypes of Blacks aren’t confined to U.S. borders. There’s the chimp-like cartoon character Memin Pinguin so beloved by Mexicans.

Even in the Middle East, they can’t resist the temptation to monkey around with the African American image. Today, I saw an email complaining of yet another primate visual. This one featured Condoleezza Rice pregnant, carrying a baby simian inside her stomach.

      What can I say? From the American South to south of the border, from the Middle East to the East Coast, racist ignorance abounds when it comes to symbolism and iconology. 

Obama's no joke to Al Qaida, KKK and other haters

 

         A little more than a year ago, I went to The Second City Theatre to enjoy its side-splitting hit revue at the time, "Between Barack and a Hard Place." The famed improv comedy ensemble, which is the comedic mother of Saturday Night Live, had put together a show that was all about Barack Obama, his candidacy and his political appeal.
    I was reminded of the series of satirical skits today when Al Qaida's mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released an audiotape calling our President-elect a House Negro.
    "You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America," observed bin Laden's sidekick in the recording.
    Has The Second City gone international with its satire? Is Al Qaida giving up on being a bunch of murderous religious zealots for stand-up comedy? What is going on here? And, where the hell is Osama bin Laden? Is he dead or simply too chicken to play straight man his deputy-villain's new routine?

    As it turns out, Obama's historic election as the first black leader of the free world has haters all over the planet in a bind. Right after the election, Thomas Robb, a grand poo-pa-pa in the Ku Klux Klan attributed Obama's success to his being only half black. Apparently Obama's Kansas mother's white, superior blood contributed to all the positive qualities that got him where he is going.
    And before our homegrown, historical terrorist group could finish explaining this inexplicable phenomenon, that terrorist group abroad figured it had some 'plaining to do as well.
    If America was as evil, racist and anti-Muslim as Al Qaida would have its followers believe, then what was the rationale behind Barack HUSSEIN Obama's popular, un-Saddam-like landslide election victory?
    Hmmm. Maybe the K.K.K. was on to something, sort of.
    The Al-Qaida tape definitely had a racial edge to it. Obama isn't a black man or anything the world's majority population--colored people--should relate to. He's a tool of the white man. The House Negro that Brother Malcolm tongue-lashed. Al-Zawahiri's audiotape features snippets from Malcolm X's 1965 speech in Selma, Alabama where he compared the "house negro," who Uncle Tommed for favors from the slave master to the "field negro," who picked cotton and would rather see the plantation owner dead. Malcolm X, the spokesman for the Nation of Islam who later became a convert to a more orthodox Muslim faith.
    Federal surveillance of both Al Qaida and the K.K.K. made it too difficult for note comparison so the Muslim haters left out the white mother part that the Christian haters promoted so prominently.
    Apparently, hiding in the cave lands of Pakistan is not the best place to keep abreast of current events or the latest trends in humanity. If bin Laden is still alive, then al-Zawahiri might want to slip him into Chicago to check out Second City's latest show so the two terrorists, like their counterparts in America the Klan and the neo-Nazis, can work on updating their hateful passions and pronouncements.
    Their work is cut out for them. Two weeks before the November 4 election, an Al Qaida website backed John McCain, not understanding that America was in the process of changing.
    The Second City, on the other hand, was right on it. The comedy theatre's current hit revue is "No Country for Old White Men." I don't hear the haters laughing.

           (This post is also on Huffingtonpost.com.)

Obama's Philsophy of Hope

    This is my last post from South Carolina. Since the Afro American News is a weekly, the next publication is next Wednesday. The polls are giving Obama a 7-10 point lead, so it looks like he may win tomorrow--but we won't know for sure until the polls close.

    Here's a transcript of an answer the Illinois senator gave to a black woman during a stop Wednesday in Rock Hill. She wanted to know what she could say to her 77-year-old father would doubted that an African American president would be able to govern because racism will hamper his effectiveness.

 

Obama’s response to a question which speaks from defeated Southern Black hopes of the past

By Monroe Anderson

AFRO Staff Writer

ROCK HILL, S.C. -- Rita Moore-Johnson asked the question that caught everybody’s attention.  It was a question rooted in the darkest days of America’s history and years of Southern oppression.

Moore-Johnson, 45, a medical lab technician, had come to Rock Hill to hear presidential candidate Barack Obama speak at one of the many rallies here before Saturday’s  Democratic primary.

Her father, she explained, is 77 years old. He is the grandson of a former slave. 

He, like his father, and his father, has spent all his life in South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies outside the state capital.

Segregation, lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan are real memories for him, not just something out of a history book.  He repeatedly has seen Black aspirations beaten down; he repeatedly has seen Black efforts met by irrational White resistance.

" I don't want to perpetuate this notion in our kids that there's a limit to what their dream is..."

And for those reasons, he is afraid to vote for Barack Obama.

So, during a question and answer session following Obama’s speech at Winthrop University,  Moore-Johnson, an Obama supporter, explained to the candidate that her father "feels that a Black president will not be able to do what he needs to  do in Washington to get change done.”

And then she asked, “What do I tell him and people like him, in a small sense that will change his mind?"

Obama responded:

“Tell him this. First of all, people said I couldn't win the United States senate race. Illinois is only 12 percent African American. And everybody said, 'wow, this black guy with the funny name. People will not  vote for him. We won by 20 percent in the primary and 30, 40 percent in the general election.

“Number one, we have shown that we can win. I am absolutely convinced that the American people, right now, they don't care if you are black, white, brown…green.

“What they care about is, are you going to help them. If I came here and I had polka dots and you were convinced that I was going to put more money in your pockets and help you pay for college and help keep America safe, you'd say

"Okay, I wish he didn't have polka dots, but I'll still vote for him."

“The thing I want you to tell him is this. This goes to what I said about hope earlier. What if Dr. King looked over 400,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial and said, ‘Y’all go home, this is too hard, we're not going to change people's attitudes’ What if John Kennedy looked up at the moon and said, ‘That's too hard. We can't go.’

“Part of the test of leadership is breaking through barriers. And most of the barriers are not barriers outside us, but barriers inside us, in our heads. We tell ourselves we can't do something. And part of what I want to do is to say "yes, we can" and I want to send that message to our children. I don't want to perpetuate this notion in our kids that there's a limit to what their dream is.

“Tell your father that he's got to be thinking of making sure he doesn’t pass that mindset on to his grandchildren and even their grandchildren. If they try, they may succeed. It's always possible that they won't succeed, but you definitely won't succeed if you don't try.”

               

 

Joe English is not connected to the not-right Republican presidential candidates

    Getting the wrong information can occasionally be a good thing. Here I am sitting on the beach at the Silver Sands Resort in Duncans, Jamaica with my laptop at hand. My friend, Joe English, told me that 56K internet access here costs $8 for half an hour, something that seemed to be not worth the effort or expense.
    Joe, a retired, rich-enough Westside Chicago real estate baron, loves Jamaica. He comes here every two or three weeks for 10 days or so. This is his 105th visit in the past 18 years. He has stayed in nearly 20 of the 90 villas for rent at Silver Sands. He knows some of the locals and some of the bigwigs. So I figured he’d know what he was talking about when it comes to the costs of things. As it turns out, Joe got it half right. It is 56K access, but if you have your own laptop, it’s only $5 an hour.
    But I am on vacation. And the sandy beach, the blue water and the Red Stripes have not exactly put me in the mood for research and writing. I am reading though. Right now, I’ve got What is What, The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers. It’s a novel about one of the Sudan’s Lost Boys, his journey to escape and, as a result, to Atlanta. If you’re confused by how I’ve just described the book, I understand. You’re going to have to Google the novel or check it out at www.amazon.com if you want an expanded explanation of what’s going on. I’m 25 pages in and fascinated.
    I’m also reading Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail ‘72. I’m amazed at how many parallels I’m discovering between then and now. The least surprising is that the Right is still wrong.
    Take my word for it. My latest column for Ebonyjet.com explains some my misgivings about, and observations, on the Republican party’s presidential field. I’ll have more to say as the campaign continues.
    I’ll be back sometime between tomorrow and the day after Christmas.

Voice Your Choice
In the presidential race, Republicans, once again, leave us no choice in the matter. A cursory review of the content of their character.
Friday, December 14, 2007
By Monroe Anderson

    The two-party pool of candidates for African American voters boils down to this: There are the Democrats, on the one hand, and there are the Democrats on the other.
    As far as the Republicans candidates are concerned, blacks need not apply.
    This was again obvious in September, when Republicans Willard Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Freddie Thompson decided to pursue other interests rather than appear at the All-American Presidential Forum hosted by Tavis Smiley.
    These men were only taking the cue set by their latter-day GOP saint, Ronald Reagan, seven presidential elections before them. In 1980, the star of B-movies and former California governor kicked off his campaign for the general election in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the infamous site where three civil rights workers–James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner–were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen during the civil rights struggle16 years earlier. This was Reagan's not-so-subtle signal to white southerners that closed minds think alike. It was also the beginning of the Republican party's "Southern Strategy" that resulted in the last of the Dixiecrats turn-coating in droves to join the GOP.
    In his Mississippi speech, Reagan announced that he believed in states' rights and that "we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." He promised to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them."
    Nearly three decades later, Republican candidates are still trying to win one for the Gipper. Consider:
    Romney–When the former Massachusetts governor gave his speech defending his Mormon religion, he neglected to explain how he had tolerated the church's official racist policies. It wasn't until 13 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed that the elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints got around to no longer officially excluding blacks. And while Romney's explaining what he knew about the church's racist practice and when he knew it, he should also explain why there are no blacks as top-tier advisers on his campaign staff.
    Giuliani–He made national news when four of New York's finest cornered Amidou Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea, in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. The plainclothes cops fired 41 shots at Diallo. Unarmed and not a suspect of any crime, Diallo died while trying to go home. Guiliani is now running on 9/11 and his boast of cleaning up New York but when the city's blacks speak of "Giuliani time," there's no nostalgia.
    Ron Paul–For some reason, the Texas congressman is the highest polling Republican presidential candidate among blacks. Surely that won't hold when word gets out that he has informed his closest supporters that "our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists -- and they can be identified by the color of their skin." Small wonder he has become the darling of the Ku Klux Klan and the Skinheads.
    Thompson–The former U.S. Senator from Tennessee, off-and-on actor and lobbyist, in a speech to the Federal Society, an organization of radical right jurists and lawyers that has pretty much hijacked the nation's jurisprudence system, said: "We need judges and justices who understand that imposing racial quotas is really a denial of what America is all about."
    McCain–His anti-civil rights voting record is right there with the worst of them. He's been rated zero percent by the ACLU. In July 1995, the Arizona senator voted yes on banning affirmative action hiring with federal funds. As a member of the U.S. House, he voted against the Dr. King national holiday.
    Mike Huckabee–The Southern Baptist minister has not exactly been at the forefront of issues that concern African Americans. But his active courting of black leaders and ministers back in the late 1990s was enough for him to garner 48 percent of the black vote while he was the governor of Arkansas.
    Compare them with the Democratic field where there's an African American, a woman, a Mexican American and a fistful of other candidates who are not antediluvian.
    So choose carefully in the fast-approaching primary elections because you'll have only one choice next November when the general rolls around.
    Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.

Maiden Voyage

This is my first post. I'll begin with my most recent column at ebonyjet.com. Tomorrow will bring something different.

Jena: Myths and Memory

setting the record straight on a crooked path

Monday, October 29, 2007

By Monroe Anderson

In the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, 131 hangman's nooses dangle from the roof in one of the exhibition galleries. This eery display is both symbolic and real. Although the nooses hanging in the museum never bore the weight of a lifeless body, each represents a political prisoner who was hanged or died in detention during South Africa's Apartheid Era.

Imagine a comparable exhibit in America. Between 1882 and 1960, more than 4,700 African Americans were lynched by sadistic white mobs in the southern United States. Incited by Klu Klux Klan terrorists campaigns, many of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned –- under color of the law.

In the middle of the last century, when the news media turned a national spotlight on the South's peculiar practices, the noose gave way to fire-hose and baton-wielding police with attack dogs. Their televised assaults spurred government action, and U.S. troops and national guardsmen went to the rescue, establishing some symbolism of honest-to-god law and order. Out of that -– and the voting rights law of 1964 -– we eventually got the new South.

Well, in Jena, La.–an old sawmill town that was at one time a KKK stronghold, and which now has a population of 2,971, that is 85 percent white -– what was old is new again.

Once again it's the outside-agitating media causing trouble for the good white folk in a small southern town. Craig Franklin, the assistant editor of the Jena Times, said as much in a widely-read, widely-circulated opinion piece that ran last week in the Christian Science Monitor. In his finger-pointing essay, Franklin took to task "the outside media" for creating myths about Jena because it was too lazy and too attracted to a "powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice" to tell the truth.

But while Franklin would have us think that the national media has purposefully created 12 myths about his small Southern town, I think it necessary to clarify a few mitigating factors: In his Christian Science Monitor essay, Franklin failed to make a full disclosure. While he was quick to point out that he lives in Jena, that his wife has taught at Jena High School for many years and that he is "probably the only reporter who has covered these events," Franklin left out a little somethin', somethin': that Sammy J. Franklin, the publisher and editor of the Jena Times, is his daddy; that the newspaper's office manager is Bonita Franklin, his daddy's wife. Or that the sheriff-elect of LaSalle Parish, who got big backing from the Jena Times, is Scott Franklin, another of his daddy's sons.

Vested interests and conflicts of interest seem familiar to the Franklin family and the Jena Times. So, naturally, he had no interest in noting that there are no black lawyers in town. Or that Jena, which he claims in his myth piece, "is a wonderful place for both whites and blacks," has no black doctors and only one black employee in the town's half-dozen banks. Since the outside media didn't widely report it, why didn't he mention that there are only two black teachers at Jena High and that one black former teacher, Cleveland Riser, 75, who rose to become an assistant superintendent of schools in LaSalle Parish, told outside reporter Todd Lewan, that blacks have long had trouble getting ahead in Jena because "the opportunity for advancing in my profession was denied, in my opinion, because I was black." ?

Why, in cataloging his myths, did Craig point out that the all-white jury that convicted teenager Mychal Bell "withstood an investigation by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division," but didn't bother to note that the public defender called no witnesses and that the deliberation lasted all of three hours? And why, in his mad rush to debunk, did Franklin fail to squarely–or fairly–address LaSalle Parish's double standard? Why didn't he express concern that Bell was charged with attempted murder -– armed with the deadly weapons of street sneakers he wore on his feet?

How about a real myth buster: Jena could learn loads from South Africa. The town could begin its lesson by forming a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.