MLK’s Words Changed Our World

NewsOne, 1-14-09

   

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By CASEY GANE-MCCALLA

(Editor's note - Today, January 15, would have MLK's 80th birthday.)

Martin Luther King, Jr. might be the greatest orator in American history. His words and speeches changed America forever. Not only did his speeches address integration, but King also gave powerful calls to action on poverty and the war in Vietnam. Here are MLK's Top 5 Speeches.

1. I Have A Dream.

This is one of the most well known and referred to speeches in modern American history.

2. Why I Am Opposed To The War In Vietnam.

Many people forget about King's strong anti-war stance. Many of the reasons he opposed the war in Vietnam relate to the current conflicts in Gaza and Iraq.

3. I Have Been To The Mountain Top.


King's last speech was prophetic. He would die the next day but his words would live on and inspire people forever.

4. The Urgency of Now.

In a theme later used by Barack Obama, King showed why integration couldn't wait.

5. A Time to Break Silence.

In this speech, Martin Luther King again outlined his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

(Casey Gane-McCalla is a writer, rapper, producer and actor, and the assistant editor for NewsOne.)

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Wave of Racist Terrorism Follows Obama Victory

NewsOne, 11-11-08

By CASEY GANE-MCCALLA

Most of the post-election reaction to Barack Obama's presidential win has been beautiful. People from all backgrounds, races, cultures and religions are elated to see such a good, decent, inspirational man become President. Many are proud of the historical significance of the United States electing a leader of African descent after the turbulent history of blacks in America.



There has also been a significant racist backlash in the wake of the election results. Which is not surprising. After seeing videos of the hate mobs attracted to McCain-Palin rallies, I politely declined an offer to cover election day in Pennsylvania or Ohio out of fear of being attacked by some angry bigot.

One of my greatest fears after the euphoria faded was that the irrational Republican crowds who were drilled into believing that Obama was a terrorist, communist, Muslim traitor would continue their anger toward the President-elect and his supporters. The campaign was heavy with racial undertones, from Rush Limbaugh's racist rants to Sarah Palin turning a blind eye to someone yelling the N-word at a rally.

Sure enough, a few pathetic racists and violent extremists have been lashing out. Since election night, there has been a string of disturbing firebombings, assaults, and incidents of vandalism directed at African-Americans.



A black church in Springfield, Massachusetts burned down on election night. While I would like to believe it was totally unrelated to racism or Obama’s triumph, I am fearful that it was. If this was a hate crime in liberal Massachusetts, it is a painful reminder of the destruction and terrorism that greeted the civil rights movement, in particular the bombing that killed four little girls in a church in Alabama.

A black family near Pittsburgh had their car torched right outside their house, while they were watching Obama give his victory speech on TV. Before the cowardly arsonists burned the car, they tossed the family's Obama yard sign through a window and spraypainted "Obama" across the trunk. The blaze almost caught the family's house on fire, leaving them afraid for their safety in a home where four generations of black Pennsylvanians have lived.


This can only be seen as an act of terrorism. Instead of a burning cross on the family’s lawn, there was a burning car, symbolizing the torching of our new African-American president. Carbombings are something you'd expect to happen in Iraq, not America.

There was another election night incident in Staten Island, New York where a 17 year-old Muslim, African-American male was beaten with baseball bats by a group of white men who repeatedly yelled, "Obama." This brings back memories of Yusef Hawkins who was chased and beaten by an angry mob in Bensonhurst during the summer of 1989, which resulted in his death.



Ali Kamara, beaten on election night

At North Carolina State University in Raleigh, four students admitted spraypainting an entire campus walkway with racist and violent threats including "Shoot Obama" and "Kill that nigger." As disgusting as that display of bigotry was, it was encouraging to see nearly 500 students and school officials including the chancellor rally against the hate. In Austin, Buck Burnette, a back up center for the University of Texas football team, wrote on his Facebook page, "All the hunters gather up, we have a Nigger in the White House." Burnette promptly apologized and was kicked off the team.



Like the examples set by NCSU and the University of Texas, we all must condemn any post-election outbursts of hatred or intimidation. While Obama's presidency is a great thing for the nation, it may trigger what remains of the lunatic racist fringe to resume their old tactics of bombings and assassinations. Already the FBI and ATF have broken up two plots to kill Obama, each originating with radical white supremacist groups.

Clearly, this election was a statement on how much progress black Americans have made in this country and how much tolerance, acceptance and even admiration whites have for an African-American candidate like Obama. The cynic in me would like to talk about how far we have to go to reach a truly colorblind society, but the optimist in me prefers to consider how far we've come.

I actually thought we'd see even more hate crimes both before and after Obama’s victory. Rather than being standard among whites, blatant racism in 2008 has been marginalized. This is not to say average white people don't have their own prejudices and stereotypes, but the dehumanizing bigotry that defined America during the Jim Crow era is now discredited. Just like Bloods and Crips don't represent most black people, and Al Qaeda doesn't typify the Arab world, bigots and white supremacists do not in any way showcase the general feelings of today’s Americans.

But terrorism perpetrated by radical racist extremists must be taken as seriously as attacks from radical Islamic extremists. We must condemn the culprits and support the victims just as we did during 9/11. Our country has matured considerably, enough to enter the age of Obama, but the fight against racism is not over. We cannot tolerate the acts of a lunatic fringe still caught up in the outdated philosophy of white supremacy.

To send a check to the rebuilding fund for the church that was burned down in Springfield, MA:

Macedonia Church of God in Christ, c/o Greater Springfield Council of Churches, 39 Oakland St., Springfield, MA 01108

Donate to the charitable fund set up to support the carbombing victims:

Whiteside Family Relief Fund, c/o First National Bank of PA, 4140 E. State St., Hermitage PA 16148

(Casey Gane-McCalla is a writer, rapper, producer and actor, and the assistant editor for NewsOne. The Latest Outrage editor Erik Ose contributed to this report.)

(UPDATE 11/25 - I (Erik) was on NPR’s News & Notes today along with Mark Potok, Director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, talking with Tony Cox about the post-election rise in hate crimes and violence first covered two weeks ago by TLO & NewsOne. You can listen to the audio of our segment HERE.

This is what I would add to the discussion we had:

Thinking about the hundreds of incidents that have occurred since the election, it's possible to lose sight of the hurt caused by any single act of racist terrorism. Here's one incident up close.

Phillip Whiteside, an African-American who lives in Greenville, PA, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania, was watching Obama's victory speech on election night at home with his family when his grandmother saw a fireball erupt outside. Phillip's grandfather, who has MS, rushed outside to find Phillip's car on fire, parked right next to their house.

This is a home where four generations of Whitesides have lived, in fact, their family came up from Tennessee and helped settle the town. The blaze threatened to spread to the house until Mr. Whiteside hosed down the outside walls with a garden hose.

After the fire burned out, the Whitesides discovered the arsonists had tossed the family's Obama yard sign into the flames and spraypainted "Obama" across the car trunk.



"We're striving for change," said Phillip. "People don't want to change. It's going back to the olden days. It doesn’t make sense that in these times we have problems like this."

In the aftermath of the fire, community members wrote letters to the local paper denouncing the hate crime, which ran an editorial reminding folks that Obama's victory does not spell the end of racism. A local bank has sent up a relief fund for the family.

But the carbombing has left the Whitesides afraid for their safety in their own home. "Not knowing what's coming," said Phillip, is how his family is feeling now.)

Yes We Can, Said Barack Obama, And We Did

The Huffington Post, 11-5-08



The day after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, our first African-American President, it is a truly historic time to be an American. Slavery was one of the United States' original sins, practiced and tolerated even as the country declared our independence from England in 1776, and part of the national fabric for nearly a century afterwards. The violent overthrow of Reconstruction in the South and imposition of Jim Crow laws relegated most black Americans to second-class citizenship for another eighty-odd years, until the civil rights movement smashed the legal underpinnings of segregation and the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally gave the power of the vote to all.

The wounds borne of such a long struggle against racism, hatred, and enforced economic servitude remain with us today. Less than a year ago, the concept of a black American president was still considered fantasy to many, or, as Bill Clinton swears he was misquoted in January, "the biggest fairy tale" imaginable. Some thought Obama’s presidential run was destined to fail for this reason alone.

Yet he won in Southern states like Virginia, capitol of the old Confederacy, and North Carolina, cradle of the sit-in movement in 1960, by mobilizing the same multi-racial coalition that first swept him over the top in South Carolina's primary early this year. And Obama carried Florida, with a big assist from his early vote strategy, the state where elections stolen from black voters shut down Reconstruction in 1876 and led to our current national nightmare under George W. Bush in 2000.


A wave of euphoria gripped the country starting on election night, with Americans dancing in the streets from coast to coast. Today, newspapers sold out their entire press runs and rushed to print more copies to meet demand for the celebratory headline, "Obama Wins." The eminent Duke University historian John Hope Franklin confirmed the national mood, calling it "one of the most momentous, if not the most historic moment in the history of this country."

Obama's victory does not spell the end of racial disparity in America, but it is a ringing sign of progress, a triumph on the road to greater equality and realizing the Dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. revealed to us.


Earlier this afternoon, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. delivered a stirring commentary on NPR’s All Things Considered (originally written for TheRoot.com) in which he compared today to the day after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and shared the reaction of Frederick Douglass:

"the greatest black orator in our history before Dr. King Jr., (who) said that the day was not a day for speeches and 'scarcely a day for prose.' Rather, he said, 'it is a day for poetry and song, a new song.' "

Goodbye and Good Riddance, Jesse Helms

Independent Weekly, 7-16-08

(Note from 2014: This post is excerpted from the new eBook available on Amazon - When Harvey Met Jesse: Attack Ads of the 1990 Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate Race in North Carolina)

I met Jesse Helms in the closing days of the 1990 U.S. Senate campaign in North Carolina. It was at one of his rallies at a Smithfield high school gymnasium in Johnston County, a place with a history of racial tensions. Schools weren’t integrated in Smithfield until 1965, eleven years after Brown v. Board of Education. As late as the mid-70s, a billboard stood on the outskirts of town proclaiming, "This is Klan Country – Help Fight Communism and Integration!"

I went to the rally because I had spent the summer traveling the state to register voters against Helms as a co-founder of Musicians Organized for Voter Education (MOVE). Now I had to see the man in the flesh.

The warm up speakers were other right-wing Republican candidates and current office holders, but none of them held a candle to Jesse when he took the stage. Frail looking and thin even then, his voice nonetheless boomed around the gymnasium like a thunderstorm. He played the crowd's fears in a virtuoso performance, stirring them out of their seats in demagogic riff after riff about homosexuals, liberals, and minorities trying to destroy the North Carolina way of life. He warned of dire consequences that would follow a victory by his African-American opponent, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt.

Helms tossed around staples from that year's version of his stump speech. Like justifying his crusade against art by hissing, "what that perverted, homosexual filth is, is not modern day Michaelangelo, it is modern day Sodom and Gomorrah!" Or mixing bigotry with down home country flavor, telling the crowd to "Think about it. Homosexuals and lesbians, disgusting people marching in our streets demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other. How do you like them apples?"


Illustration by Ethan Wenberg

Never before or since have I witnessed a crowd whipped into such a frenzy, or felt more prejudice and ignorance all around me than I experienced at that rally. Maybe it was that the audience, like those attending many of Helms' events, was made up mostly of senior citizens raised during the segregation era. They grew up bigoted partly because they didn’t know any better, and voted for Helms because he appeared to be like them. Yet to me, it seemed that hatred hung in the air.

When it was over, by chance I ran into Helms as he was leaving the high school, and something possessed me to shake his hand, to see if he felt as menacing as he sounded. His hand was cold, and soft and flabby as a jellyfish. He was just a man, not the Devil. But there was evil in his politics.

Jesse Helms' Shameful Legacy Can't Be Whitewashed

The Huffington Post, 7-13-08

(Note from 2014: This post is excerpted from the new eBook available on Amazon - When Harvey Met Jesse: Attack Ads of the 1990 Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate Race in North Carolina)

The urge to speak no ill of the dead is a powerful one. And it was on full display this week as former Senator Jesse Helms was laid to rest. Although one brave North Carolina state employee, L.F. Eason, resisted that urge when he refused to lower the flag at his state lab to honor Helms and was forced to retire.

Republican leaders including Vice President Cheney attended Helms' funeral. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky eulogized Helms as one of the "kindest men" in Congress, and said, "no matter who you were, he always had a thoughtful word and a gentle smile."



Which is a load of crap. Clearly, McConnell saw the charming face Helms could present to the world when he wanted to. But the real Jesse Helms oozed out nearly every time he opened his mouth to slander those who didn't agree with him. He claimed "crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced" in a 1981 New York Times interview, and in 1963 asked, "Are civil rights only for Negroes? White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights."

Helms reserved his full disgust for gays and lesbians, who he called "weak, morally sick wretches" (1994), accused of engaging in "incredibly offensive and revolting conduct" (1990), and warned his constituents to beware "homosexuals, lesbians, disgusting people marching in the streets, demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other" (1990).

Beyond his hateful words, Helms' bigotry was shown by his political aims. He led the opposition to the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and consistently opposed civil rights legislation. For nearly two decades, he fought tooth and nail against expanded federal funding for AIDS research, and exploited gays and lesbians as convenient scapegoats in his constant fear-mongering crusade.


Helms at 1990 campaign rally, moments after calling gays "disgusting people"

Media post-mortems of Helms' career were mostly deferential, especially in North Carolina, the state he represented in the Senate for five terms. N.C. television stations and newspapers glossed over almost all of Helms' ugly history as the last unapologeticly racist politician of the segregation era. Even the liberal Raleigh News & Observer kept its gloves on, despite having been Helms' favorite press punching bag for years.

It was largely a repeat of the softball treatment Helms got when he announced his retirement in 2001. Then, the Washington Post called Helms "one of the most powerful conservatives on Capitol Hill for three decades," and the New York Times said he'd been "a conservative stalwart for nearly 30 years." But they avoided serious discussion of how Helms stirred the pot of bigotry and hatred to win elections and further his political career.

Helms grew up in small town Monroe, N.C., home to an active Ku Klux Klan. His father, known as Mr. Jesse, was the police chief and a mean, imposing 6' 4" man who didn't hesitate to intimidate and run roughshod over the civil rights of Monroe's black citizens.


Jesse A. Helms, Sr.

In North Carolina historian Tim Tyson's biography of civil rights leader Robert Williams, head of the Monroe NAACP, Williams described watching when he was eleven years old as Mr. Jesse beat a black woman on the street, then "dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head." He was haunted for years by the woman's "tortured screams as the flesh was ground away from the friction of the concrete."

Interviewed in 2005 for the documentary Senator No and asked about Monroe in the 1920s and 30s, Helms said, "In so many ways I think the relationship between the races was far better than it is now. I could give you a thousand examples of why I'm convinced of that. I don't know of anybody who ever persecuted anybody of another race."

Helms had his first brush with statewide politics in 1950. Employed as a radio reporter for conservative magnate A.J. Fletcher's WRAL network, he unofficially aided right wing Raleigh attorney Willis Smith in his primary campaign against incumbent U.S. Senator and North Carolina liberal hero Frank Porter Graham.

Graham beat Smith in the initial Democratic primary, and Smith had all but decided not to call for a runoff. But three Supreme Court decisions undermining segregation were announced within weeks, inflaming racial tensions in the South. Helms took to the airwaves and urged Smith's voters to assemble at his Raleigh house and ask him to reconsider. A mob of supporters responded, and Smith called for a runoff.


The scene outside Willis Smith's home in Raleigh, June 1950

In the runoff, Helms used the skills he had learned as a reporter to help create scurrilous, race-baiting ads and handbills for Smith's candidacy. One was headlined, "White People - WAKE UP Before It's Too Late," and asked, "Do you want negroes working beside you, your wife and daughters in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."


Handbill created by Jesse Helms for Willis Smith's 1950 runoff campaign

The most infamous was a flyer featuring a fake photo, doctored to show Sen. Graham's wife dancing with a black man. Helms and his backers later went to great lengths to cover up his role in the Smith campaign, but as biographer Ernest Furgurson put it, "Jesse was in it up to his neck." Helms went to Washington with the victorious Sen. Willis Smith, hired as his top assistant.

Throughout the 1960s, Helms denounced the civil rights movement from his bully pulpit as the most widely known TV and radio commentator in North Carolina. He delivered snarling five-minute commentaries that were broadcast twice a day at the end of WRAL's newscasts, railing against integration, liberals, and anything the Kennedys said or did. Helms' diatribes were reprinted in newspapers throughout North Carolina and the South with titles like "Nation Needs to Know of Red Involvement in Race Agitation!"

He called civil rights workers "Communists and sex perverts," claimed there was "evidence that the Negroes and whites participating in the march to Montgomery participated in sex orgies of the rawest sort," and commented "they should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro," in response to students holding campus vigils when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

Helms won election to the U.S. Senate in 1972 after tying his Greek-American opponent to George McGovern and using the slogan, "Jesse Helms: He's One of Us!" He was soon dubbed "Senator No" for his votes against government spending on social programs, including education, environmental protection, school lunches, food stamps, and aid to the disabled.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Helms and his political organization, the National Congressional Club, made a lasting impact on American politics by helping Ronald Reagan come from behind to win the North Carolina primary. This victory sparked a surge for Reagan in the late contests that almost led to his unseating President Gerald Ford as the Republican nominee. It sealed Reagan's position as the 1980 frontrunner following Ford's narrow general election loss to Jimmy Carter.



To win North Carolina, the Helms machine went all out. They ran hard-hitting attack ads slamming Ford over the Panama Canal Treaty. And of course, Helms used racially coded appeals. Tens of thousands of leaflets were distributed that alleged Ford was considering picking a black running mate.


Button from 1976 Republican Convention

Close Helms advisor Tom Ellis founded the National Congressional Club in 1973 to retire Helms' first campaign debt. He later admitted the Club's role in distributing the race-baiting leaflets against Ford, at his 1983 confirmation hearing to serve as a Reagan appointee to the Board for International Broadcasting. Ellis was forced to withdraw after it was also revealed that he served as Director of the Pioneer Fund from 1973-77, which funded research into racial genetics and churned out reports alleging blacks were genetically inferior.


National Congressional Club founder Tom Ellis

In the late 70s, Helms called for ending sanctions on formerly white run Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. His aides interfered with negotiations to turn over rule to the country’s black majority by encouraging then-Prime Minister Ian Smith to hold out for more concessions.

Helms was a strong supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He voted against virtually every U.S. measure ever proposed to pressure the white minority government, no matter how mild. Speaking against one attempt to impose economic sanctions, Helms claimed, "all this bill does is exacerbate the situation in South Africa." Referring to anti-apartheid protests, he asked, "who are we to be so pious about the efforts of the South African government to stop the riots, the looting, the shooting and the mayhem that's going on over there?" Even when Congress overrode a Reagan veto and finally imposed sanctions in 1986, by a lopsided Senate vote of 78-21, Helms voted no, arguing the move would result in a "lasting tyranny" of Communism in South Africa.

He even served for a time as chairman of the editorial advisory board for a conservative think tank called the International Freedom Foundation, founded in 1986, run by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The IFF was later revealed to have been set up and funded by the South African government, dedicated to waging “political warfare” against enemies of apartheid. When Newsday broke the truth in 1995, Helms spokesman Marc Thiessen (now chief White House speechwriter for George W. Bush) claimed Helms had “never heard of” IFF.


N.C. students protesting apartheid cross paths with Helms, 1984

Helms filibustered against renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982. The next year, he made national headlines and drew heavy criticism when he led the charge against making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday.

In his 1984 re-election fight against sitting N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt, Helms went to the mat in a knock-down, drag-out campaign remembered as one of the nastiest campaigns in modern history. Perhaps realizing he had overreached in his overt displays of racism, Helms dialed back his attacks on blacks and minorities, although he still stirred up fear of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. According to the Washington Post, "his campaign newspaper featured photographs of Hunt with Jackson and headlines like ‘Black Voter Registration Rises Sharply’ and ‘Hunt Urges More Minority Registration.’"

But Helms had found a even scarier bogeyman - the homosexual menace. He and his supporters repeatedly linked Jim Hunt to gay activists and took every opportunity to "throw rocks at the gays," as the N.C. Republican Party chair explained Helms' strategy.


Helms at press conference, 1982

During the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis unfolded, Helms led the opposition in the U.S. Senate to increased federal funding for AIDS research. This was perhaps Jesse Helms' greatest crime, and left real blood on his hands. Even a modest increase in spending could have saved tens of thousands of gay Americans who died horrible, painful deaths in the years before effective AIDS drugs were developed.

In 1987 he said, "Somewhere along the line we're going to have to quarantine people with AIDS." Helms' uncaring response to the disease was explained by his tirade the next year against the bipartisan Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill, when he claimed, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

Helms continued to oppose AIDS funding throughout the 1990s. In 1995, he fought reauthorization of the Ryan White Act, saying AIDS victims contracted the disease through "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." That same year, nationally syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers called him out as a liar when she published a sharp rebuke to his efforts to cut AIDS funding, headlined "These are the facts, Sen. Helms."


Helms makes his point, 2002

Sadly, this account only scratches the surface of all Jesse Helms' shameful words and deeds. No amount of whitewashing Helms' legacy can erase the stain of his reliance on hate-filled, divisive politics, or the hurt he caused so many people in the process.

Two Deaths, One America

Independent Weekly, Durham NC, 6-16-04

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Last week it was hard not to notice a great American had died. There were front page newspaper stories, TV coverage, and the radio waves were filled with his voice. On Friday, every post office in the nation shut down in his honor. Well, at least we can dream the person we're talking about had been Ray Charles, and not Ronald Wilson Reagan.

They say famous deaths come in threes, but in this case, two was enough to put an ironic spin on the week's events. Repeatedly, corporate media talking heads told us why Ronnie was worthy of saintly status. They called him an enduring symbol of our nation's freedom, an optimist who ended the Cold War, and lots of other fawning superlatives. Glossed over was any mention of Reagan's legacy as a divider, a politician who spent much of the 1970's traveling the country peddling thinly veiled racism, telling white audiences made-up anecdotes about welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

While being interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air in 1998, Ray Charles reminded us that music isn't about color, and that's what makes it so beautiful. He reminisced about the integrated world of the big bands and jazz musicians of the 40's and 50's, and talked of how he'd once toured with a "hillbilly" band known as the Florida Playboys. At the same time, in Hollywood, the future 40th President of the United States was helping Joe McCarthy conduct a witch hunt in the U.S. film industry as head of the Screen Actors Guild. Instead of standing up against McCarthyism and red-baiting, Reagan was one of its cheerleaders, ruining the lives of numerous blacklisted actors, writers, and other professionals.

Both men were born poor, but only one of them remembered where he came from. As President, Reagan used his political power to curtail the opportunities available to the less fortunate by cutting social programs and giving tax cuts to the wealthy. Predictably, the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. From his bully pulpit, Reagan preached that government was the problem, not any kind of solution, and staffed federal agencies with rabid true believers who shared this limited vision. That is, when they weren't far right-wing religious zealots like Attorney General Ed Meese, the ideological ancestor of John Ashcroft, who saw pornography and pot as the biggest threats facing America. James Watt, Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, admitted to Congress in 1981 he didn't think there was a true need to protect the environment, because "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns."

It should be obvious that Ray Charles' music reached across lines to touch all Americans. He pioneered the mixing of musical genres, creating a gumbo of gospel and rhythm & blues that nearly singlehandedly spawned the sound eventually known as soul music. In the early 60's, he began recording country songs, making it clear that for Ray Charles, music knew no boundaries. And at a time when controversy could have been career ending for him, Ray Charles showed the true meaning of courage by actively supporting the civil rights movement - playing benefits, contributing his money and time.

The only time Reagan ever made an attempt to reach out to black Americans was when he invited the New York City Breakers to showcase their breakdancing moves for him and Nancy at the Lincoln Center. During Reagan's first term, this country suffered through the harshest recession in two generations. Factories closed, jobs were lost, and the safety net was slashed. But as hard as times were for whites, for black Americans, it was more like another Depression. Black voters remembered how his policies had brought pain to their communities, and rewarded Reagan with just 9% of their votes in 1984.

It is likely they also remembered the numerous symbolic steps Reagan took to exploit racism among white voters, like kicking off his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers on June 21, 1964. While Reagan's casket was flying coast to coast last week, another memorial ceremony was coincidentally underway as a caravan of volunteers remembered the legacy of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by embarking on a bus tour voter registration drive from New York to Mississippi, including a planned stop in Greensboro. A young congressman from Mississippi named Trent Lott was among those who urged Reagan to begin his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, and the speech Reagan gave that day called for renewed respect of "states rights," time honored code words for a return to segregation.

Above and beyond his overt support for the civil rights movement, his authorship of songs like "Hit The Road Jack" that were later adapted as freedom songs, and his personal friendship with Martin Luther King Jr., Ray Charles played a largely unrecognized role in helping end segregation forever. In the post-WWII era, black and white musicians started making music together, appearing together on stage, and borrowing from each other's musical traditions. Artists like Benny Goodman, Johnny Ray, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley paid homage to black music, while Chuck Berry, Nat Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. crossed over to whites. As musicians integrated, their audiences followed, and mixed crowds enjoying performances by mixed bands became more common. The cultural foundations of segregation were undermined, and leading the charge of this new movement in colorblind musical styles was Ray Charles.

Reagan's critics never got much mileage out of pointing out he was an actor, playing the role of the President. But today we can look back and realize Reagan's presidency was all smoke and mirrors. If, as Reagan claimed, he didn't know what Oliver North, John Poindexter and the other criminals on his National Security Council were doing while they were selling weapons to Iran and using the profits to fund an undeclared war in Nicaragua, then we see how he was truly just a figurehead. The alternative, that he was aware of Iran-Contra, and lied to the country to cover it up, would merely be more evidence of his acting skills. It's fitting that his funeral itself was meticulously staged, working from a 130-page "script" drawn up by Ronnie and Nancy in the mid-1990's, before his Alzheimer's reached the final stages.

So reflecting on the passing of these two Americans, what will be their true place in history? In the final analysis it's how they will be remembered in people's hearts and minds. Last week the national Republican Party tried hard to canonize Reagan and create a national week of mourning to rival what greeted JFK's assassination in 1963. They undoubtedly hoped a fringe benefit might be to provoke a burst of pro-Republican sentiment in the country at large and help boost George W. Bush's recently sagging poll ratings.

But the sad truth is that the crowds who turned out to honor Reagan were nearly all white, and mostly self-described Republicans to begin with. Thinking back on the two men, and what they did with their lives, it's not hard to see why in contrast, all of America mourns Ray Charles.

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Race Relations in America: Fragile and Deteriorating?

November, 1991. Italian-American residents of Bensonhurst, New York react with anger to the ninth in a series of marches through the streets of their community by thousands of protestors, predominantly African-Americans.



Led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, the marches have been organized to keep public attention focused on the death of black teenager Yusef Hawkins. Hawkins was murdered in August, 1989 by several Bensonhurst youths, who suspected him of entering their community in search of white females. Earlier that morning, two of his alleged killers have been acquitted on murder charges and released.



"N-ggers, n-ggers, you motherfucking n-ggers," yell some onlookers. Crowds of white people hold up watermelons for the obliging television cameras.



Admittedly, Bensonhurst showcases an extreme example of poisoned race relations in a modern day American community. But the fact that such hatred can be openly witnessed in even one area of our country should gravely trouble us all. Today, more than twenty-five years have passed since our society finally began to dismantle the legal and institutional frameworks that enforced segregation between Americans of different races. Yet it can credibly be argued that there is still a potential for the hatred which exists in Bensonhurst to be exhibited elsewhere, in many other American cities and towns.

Some would go further, and argue that race relations in America today are not only still fragile, but noticably deteriorating. Things are bad and getting worse. Our times demand serious inquiry into all aspects of the history of race relations in America.

(Editor's note, 11/12/10 - This was the introduction to a never-completed paper on notable race riots of the twentieth century. I wanted to look at what sparked riots in Detroit in 1943, Watts in '65, and Newark in '67. I should have stuck closer to home, and focused on one shameful episode in North Carolina history - the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, the only time in American history that a coup d'etat has successfully overthrown a lawfully elected local government. But I bit off more than I could chew with other papers I was working on at the time, and never started writing this one.

Little did I know that later that summer (1992), the L.A. riots would explode, writing a fresh chapter of our national failure to all get along. This would have been a really timely project.)