July 23 - 29, 2010

NAACP criticism of Tea Party justified

By Ron Walters
Guest Columnist

It was another right-on-time moment that Ben Jealous exercised at the NAACP Convention in calling out the Tea Party for coddling elements of racism within their midst. 
The convention went on to pass a resolution to this effect, calling on the leadership of the Tea Party to repudiate these elements, but it will not become official until approved by the Executive Committee in October.  

Right away, Mark Williams, the head of a group called the Tea Party Express and a California radio host, posted a letter to his website that was aimed at Jealous and dripping with racism. 

The interpretive letter – written as if it were speaking in a black person’s voice – said, in part: “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards.

“That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People,” it continued, “and we demand that it stop.” 
With this racist letter, he made Jealous’ case and he did it so strong that, flush with sensitivity to the NAACP charges, the Tea Party Federation kicked Williams out.

This was a positive act by the federation because the leading lights of the Republican Party still, either said nothing, or defended the movement. 

For example, Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, said on CNN that he was not “interested in getting into that debate.” When asked if he’d seen signs depicting President Obama as Hitler, he said such extremism exists at the fringe of both parties. 

But the usual suspects, personalities like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and others, jumped into the fray to defend the movement.  Palin, widely regarded as the mother of the Tea Party movement, said the charge of racism was unfair. Beck, FOX TV show host, said he would repudiate the elements of racism if he knew where they were.

The big push back from the Right, however, has been to raise the New Black Panther Party case from the grave.  On November 4, 2008, some members of the New Black Panther party went to a polling station in downtown Philly because they had heard that white people would be trying to stop Blacks voters from voting for Obama.

The Bush administration Justice Department did not bring suit because although the law (intimidating voters) was potentially broken, no one had been prevented from going to the polls; in other words, there was no injured party.  

Now the case is in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and conservatives have charged that Eric Holder is covering it up and a former conservative staffer who resigned said the case was not being pursued because they only want to bring discrimination charges against whites. 

So, Fox news and other right-wingers have succeeded in pushing this issue up into the spotlight by arguing that the liberal fringe also has racist groups.  Most importantly, they have charged that the left wing media wasn’t carrying the story and The Washington Post, CNN and others have slavishly fallen in line. 

If some people want to compare the actions of the New Black Panther party to those of the Tea Party, which still has thousands of adherents, it calls into question their motives.  Most likely they want to cover up the racism in the Tea Party.  The Panthers have no influence in black or Democratic Party leadership circles but the Tea Party is the main influence in the Republican Party at this time.

Still, I am amazed that major news organizations, so intimidated by the right, will give credibility to this made-up story on the Panthers on equal terms to the NAACP’s criticism of Tea Party racism. 

Dr. Ron Walters is a political analyst and Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.   One of his books is: White Nationalism, Black Interests (Wayne State University Press) 

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July 16 - 22, 2010

Heat on LeBron unfair, unwarranted

By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist

If there were any doubts about whether LeBron James should have migrated from the cold winters of Cleveland to sunny Miami, they were removed when Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers’ majority owner, issued a scathing criticism of Cleveland’s “former hero” who demonstrated “cowardly betrayal” by deciding not to remain in Cleveland after becoming a free agent.

Gilbert’s open letter to fans was actually an open attack on James, who gave the franchise seven years to assemble an adequate support crew around him. When they failed, he opted to sign with the Miami Heat, where he will be paired with two all-star teammates.

James was wrong to make Gilbert learn of his decision by watching James’ reality TV announcement on ESPN instead of extending him the courtesy of a telephone call before the announcement. Still, that didn’t justify Gilbert’s attempt to humiliate has former star attraction.

“As you know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier,” Gilbert wrote. “This was announced with a several-day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his decision unlike anything ever witnessed in the history of sports and probably the history of entertainment.”

He told the fans, “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal.”

Speaking of cowards, Gilbert waited until his superstar jilted him to accuse King James of choking in four playoff games against the Boston Celtics. If James threw in the towel against the Celtics, as Gilbert suggests, then why is the owner so enraged that #23 is headed to Miami? Furthermore, if Gilbert harbored such thoughts, isn’t he a coward for waiting until James left Cleveland before expressing those thoughts?

Let’s get a few things straight. The NBA has tight restrictions on the mobility of players. It stacks the deck by allowing the home team to offer more money than competitors and rules that a player cannot choose another team until he has been cut or his contract expires. While under contract, teams can’t even approach other players about the possibility of joining them without facing tampering charges.

When James became eligible for free agency, he had to weigh whether his best chance of winning an NBA championship rested with staying in Cleveland or moving to Miami to join fellow NBA All-Stars Dwayne Wade and newly-acquired Chris Bosh.

There is no question that by signing James and Bosh and re-signing Wade, the youthful Miami Heat instantly becomes a favorite to win next season’s NBA championship and many more.

Angry fans who burned James’ old Cleveland jersey in protest accused the superstar of making a selfish decision. They forget that professional basketball is first and foremost a business. And as a shrewd businessman – and one of the games’ greatest players – James agreed to leave millions on the table in an effort to win his first NBA championship. 

Cleveland fans need to get over it. I saw men on TV crying over losing James to Miami. Yes, crying. There’s something wrong with such an over emphasis on sports, especially if, as one of those interviewed said, “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”

Ironically, it may be one of the best things to happen to Jesse Jackson. Jackson – who has been teetering on the edge of irrelevancy since vowing to remove certain body parts of Barack Obama – found a way to inject himself into the LeBron James saga.

In a statement posted on the Rainbow PUSH Coalition website, Jackson said, “LeBron is not a child, nor is he bound to play on Gilbert’s plantation…”

Referring to the Cleveland owner, Jackson said, “He speaks as an owner of LeBron and not the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. His feelings of betrayal personify a slave/master mentality. He sees LeBron as a runaway slave.”

Jayson Whitlock, an outspoken Black sports writer, challenged the notion of  “NBA owners and their $100-million contracts are slave owners and King James is Kunta Kinte escaping on the Underground Railroad to Miami...”

He wrote, “Dan Gilbert’s rant was certainly immature, but it wasn’t remotely racist. He sounded like a scorned lover, a guy who gave his heart to a relationship and found out on national TV that the alleged love of his life didn’t care about him at all.”

A scorned Dan Gilbert told Cleveland fans: “I personally guarantee that the Cleveland Cavaliers will win an NBA Championship before the self-titled former ‘King’ wins one. You can take that to the bank.”
If you take that promissory note to the bank, be prepared to be arrested for fraud. There is no way Cleveland will win an NBA title before LeBron & Company wins one in Miami. Cleveland couldn’t win a championship with LeBron. They have less chance of winning one without him.

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com

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July 9 - 15, 2010

Setting the record straight on Thurgood Marshall

By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist

In an effort to depict Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as an activist judge,  Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele have made misleading and unwarranted attacks on Thurgood Marshall, for whom Kagan served as a clerk for one year.

During the first day of hearings on the Kagan nomination, Marshall’s name was mentioned 35 times, compared to only 14 for President Barack Obama.

In his opening statement, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said, “Justice Marshall’s judicial philosophy is not what I would consider to be mainstream.” He said Marshall, a legendary civil rights lawyer and the first African-American to sit on the Supreme Court, “might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge.”

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee who was rejected for a federal judgeship earlier in his career, claimed Marshall’s legal view “does not comport with the proper role of a judge.”

Those characterizations of Marshall – who was appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy and as U.S. Solicitor General in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson – ignores his success as a lawyer and as a judge.

As chief attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation suit that outlawed separate but equal schools.

As Solicitor General from 1965-1967, he won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Court on behalf of the federal government. And while serving as an appeals court judge, none of Marshall ’s 98 majority decisions were reversed by the Supreme Court.

Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967, where he served until he retired in 1991. He died two years later at age 84.

In a tribute to Marshall , Kagan wrote: “During the year that marked the bicentennial of the Constitution, Justice Marshall gave a characteristically candid speech. He declared that the Constitution, as originally drafted and conceived, was ‘defective;’ only over the course of 200 years had the nation ‘attain [ed] the system of constitutional government, and its respect for… individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.”

In a raw display of historical ignorance, Michael Steele urged Senate Republicans to question Kagan’s “support for statements suggesting that the Constitution ‘as originally drafted and conceived, was defective.”
Even he had to later “clarify” his statement after it was pointed out to him that the original framers of the Constitution endorsed the concept of slavery, viewed African-Americans as property to be bought and sold and extended no rights to women. It took a Civil War and 27 amendments to form what the Founding Fathers called “a more perfect union.”

When the nation was celebrating the bicentennial of the United States Constitution in 1987, Thurgood Marshall had the courage to challenge the three-year celebration of the Founding Fathers’ achievements.
“I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention,” he said on May 6, 1987 in a speech to the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Association. “Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound.

“To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedom and human rights, we hold fundamental today.

“When contemporary Americans cite ‘The Constitution,’ they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.”

Rather than lavishly praising the drafters of the Constitution, Marshall said the credit belongs to “those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and strived to better them.”
Interestingly, opponents of Kagan have adopted the same guilt-by-association tactic used against Marshall when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. In that instance, political opponents tried to link him to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was not such a beloved figure in some circles at the time. Critics ignored tension between King, who believed in street protests, and the more conservative Marshall, who though such issues should be resolved in court. The Senate confirmed Marshall by a vote of 69-11.

Today, in an effort to derail Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Senate Republicans are trying to make her appointment a referendum on Thurgood Marshall, a legal and civil rights icon. As his son, Thurgood, Jr., noted in a column last Friday in the Washington Post, “Two former [ Marshall ] clerks, Ralph K. Winter and Douglas Ginsburg, were nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan. Those nominations did not prompt the kind of harsh innuendo to which we have been subjected to this week.”

Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill) had it right when he stated, “ America is a better nation because of the tenacity, integrity and values of Thurgood Marshall.” He added, “If that is an activist mind at work, we should be grateful as a nation.”

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.

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July 2 - 8, 2010

Two Lawyers’ Groups Have Reservations about Kagan

By George E. Curry

Although the NAACP and Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network have enthusiastically endorsed Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, two key legal groups have so far refrained from endorsing the former Harvard law dean amid questions about whether she would be a strong civil rights advocate on the court.

That split underscores the complexities of a civil rights community eager – some say over eager – to support the nation’s first African-American president and some highly-respected legal organizations that are in a much better position to evaluate the appointment of Kagan to fill the seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens, a reliable liberal vote on the sharply-divided Supreme Court.

Mavis T. Thompson, president of the National Bar Association, the largest organization of Black lawyers and judges, said the group gave Kagan only a lukewarm rating because of concerns about her positions on crack-cocaine sentencing disparities and her record on diversity at Harvard.

Although Kagan is clearly qualified to join the court, Thompson said, “We hope Ms. Kagan’s views on civil rights and equal justice will become apparent during the confirmation hearings. To date, the NBA has withheld its endorsement due to insufficient information to ensure that Ms. Kagan’s views are consistent with the core missions of the organization.”

Barbara R. Arwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, said her organization voted not to take a position on Kagan.

“There isn’t a judicial record to review, indicating her views on critical civil rights matters,” she told the Washington Post. “And otherwise, the civil rights record that exists is thin and mixed.”

Despite that mixed record, Sharpton issued a statement saying, “President Obama’s nomination of Ms. Kagan – a New Yorker who was a clerk for the Honorable Thurgood Marshall and who has shown balance and fairness throughout her career – is worthy of the support of the civil rights community.”
It took the NAACP just five days to endorse Kagan.

“After a careful and thorough review of Elena Kagan’s record, we have unanimously voted to endorse her nomination,” President and CEO Benjamin Jealous said in a statement.  By contrast, the NAACP took nine times as long to research Clarence Thomas before opposing his nomination.

Jealous, like Sharpton, noted that Kagan once clerked for legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But make no mistake about it, Kagan is no Thurgood Marshall. Not even close. When Marshall joined the court, no one questioned his commitment to civil rights.

As a recent story in the Los Angeles Times observed, “Though Marshall was an unwavering liberal, Kagan already appeared less so. Memos on file in Marshall’s papers at the Library of Congress show Kagan to be cautious, skeptical and, at times, scornful of those who would push the law too far to the left.”

Because Kagan has not served as a judge, has written curiously little about major civil rights issues, and has a record of courting conservatives, many are looking at her time at Harvard, her service in the Clinton White House and her short tenure as solicitor general for clues on what kind of judge she might become.

Critics note that of the 43 full-time faculty members hired during her tenure at Harvard, only two were Black and one was Asian. After studying her record, scholars found that of the 32 tenured and tenure-track faculty appointments under Kagan, only one was a person of color (Asian) and seven were women.”

Many prominent conservatives have endorsed Kagan, including Charles Fried, solicitor general in the Reagan administration; Ken Starr, the person who prosecuted Bill Clinton, and Theodore Olson, who served as solicitor general for George W. Bush. Those endorsements have raised the eyebrows of progressives.
With conservatives holding a 5-4 edge on the Supreme Court, Obama can’t afford to be wrong about Kagan. Other presidents have lived to regret their Supreme Court appointments. 

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