Sunday, December 13, 2009
REMEMBER COINTELPRO?
Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise "of a black Messiah" that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force. This documentary establishes historical perspective on the measures initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI which aimed to discredit black political figures and forces of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Combining declassified documents, interviews, rare footage and exhaustive research, it investigates the government's role in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. Were the murders the result of this concerted effort to avoid "a black Messiah"? Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the peopl...all » Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise "of a black Messiah" that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force. This documentary establishes historical perspective on the measures initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI which aimed to discredit black political figures and forces of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Combining declassified documents, interviews, rare footage and exhaustive research, it investigates the government's role in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. Were the murders the result of this concerted effort to avoid "a black Messiah"?«
Rise of The New Black Leaders
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/12/gerrymander/print.html
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Rise of the new black leaders
A new generation of black politicians is striving to put racial patronage and civic corruption behind it, and unite an increasingly diverse nation.
By Chris Thompson
Ron Dellums is a legend in Oakland, Calif. Thirty-five years ago, he was a passionate young congressman who went to Washington and denounced apartheid and the Vietnam War. He represented the town that spawned the Black Panthers and embodied black anger and ambition in America. His endorsement virtually guaranteed victory for any progressive young politician, and while he personally transcended crude racial politics, he was also the most celebrated African-American in a hard-luck town.
This Oct. 7, after almost a decade of retirement from public life, Dellums returned to Oakland, climbed the stage at the city's community college, and declared he was running for mayor. "If Ron Dellums running for mayor gives you hope," he said, "then let's get on with it!" The room exploded with cheers and politicos fell sobbing into each other's arms.
But Dellums is an odd sort of savior. For one thing, he made it clear he didn't want the job and had agreed to run only because hundreds of his old comrades begged him. For another, he's so, well, old. At age 69, Ron Dellums put politics behind him long ago and rarely set foot in Oakland over the years. An entire generation has grown up with no idea who he is. But in this election he's the last real chance for a black mayor to lead Oakland, once one of the country's epicenters of urban black life.
The case of Ron Dellums epitomizes a historic change in American politics. Dellums himself was always more than a machine pol; in fact, Rep. Barbara Lee called him "the father of coalition politics" in a recent e-mail to Salon. But the fans who tearfully rejoiced over his entry into the mayor's race represent all that is left of Oakland's racial old guard. They evoke a time when Oakland and black legislative districts around the country were run by leaders who often set up racial patronage systems, tolerated corruption and ineptitude, and never had to worry about competitive elections.
But today, particularly in the West, an era of black political power centered in urban enclaves is coming to an end. Latino migration is supplanting traditional African-American majorities in cities such as Compton and Los Angeles, and a rising black middle class is moving into the suburbs. California's inner cities are becoming less black and the political machines that have run them for decades are gasping their last breath. The number of black members of the California state Legislature has shrunk from nine in 1990 to six today, and no black state legislator holds office north of Los Angeles County. Tom Bradley ran Los Angeles for 20 years, Willie Brown ruled over San Francisco, and black mayors presided over Oakland from 1977 to 1998; today, none of those cities can boast an African-American mayor.
While at first glance this may seem like an unsettling development, it is also showing signs of producing a more responsive, transparent and sophisticated generation of African-American leaders.
Beginning with the Voting Rights Act in 1964, a wave of gerrymandering carved out black legislative districts around the nation, making race-based redistricting a legal right. According to Ana Henderson, a former Justice Department lawyer who worked on voting rights issues, the act enabled minority plaintiffs who could cite racist voting patterns to force cities to draw " majority minority" city council districts. "If you can break the city down to districts, and have each councilmember elected out of a district, and you can draw a district that is majority minority, those minority voters are going to be able to elect a candidate of their choice," she says.
From the mid-'60s onward, a coalition of black Democrats and white Republicans began redrawing congressional districts by race. This alliance finally gave black politicians the power that is their natural birthright. In 1966, just six black congressmen held office; today 42 African-Americans sit in the House.
Clearly, African-American empowerment was a critical step in American democracy, and the promise of opportunity for millions of black citizens is hard to overstate. But black power also gave rise to the modern gerrymandering era in which incumbent politicians use computer demographic research to rig the drawing of legislative districts. In the West, gerrymandering coincided with a racial patronage system that allowed bureaucratic incompetence and corruption to fester, sometimes on a vast scale. In the South, the process squeezed out white Democratic leaders, ultimately helping the Republican Party retake Congress in 1994.
Today, gerrymandering poisons politics at every level, as operatives from both parties typically collude to create safe seats for their respective incumbents. In California, this has suppressed emerging immigrant communities, retarding the growth of basic democratic institutions. If Latino or Asian-American leaders can't achieve higher offices such as congressional or state legislative seats, as is often the case in gerrymandered districts in Southern California, they can't mentor a new generation of young leaders to take their place on school districts, city councils, and county boards of supervisors. Nationally, gerrymandering has crippled the possibility of political dialogue and compromise, as extremists from either side no longer have to appeal to those with moderate sentiments in their districts.
At the same time, however, urban patronage machines are showing signs of grinding to a halt. Black politics is maturing beyond the language of grievance and adopting an increasingly middle-class, entrepreneurial character. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of black-owned businesses grew by a staggering 45 percent. More and more black professionals are buying homes in outlying suburbs relatively free from gang violence and urban blight.
As they build middle-class lives, African-Americans are adopting middle-class values: an intolerance of corruption and an expectation of accountability from their political leaders. Having outgrown identity politics, they are forcing black leaders to run on their own merits in racially diverse districts. Throughout the country, they are demanding not just representative diversity but better government.
Nowhere is this more evident than in last month's reelection of New York's Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who received half the black vote and 30 percent of the Latino vote, despite challenger Fernando Ferrer's deliberate campaign as a Latino candidate. In the election's aftermath, reported the New York Times, national Democratic Party leaders said they "needed to shun the racial and ethnic politicking of the past."
The grand era of identity politics was an inevitable and important outgrowth of the civil rights movement. But one need look no further than Oakland to see how racial patronage devolved into corruption and incompetency -- and how the city has since discarded such politics and learned to demand results from their leaders.
Dec 12, 2005 Black power rose in Oakland in the early '80s, as Mayor Lionel Wilson built a slim majority on the City Council, and the Rev. J. Alfred Smith managed a portfolio of untouchable bureaucrats from his pulpit at Allen Temple Baptist Church. Harold Davis, the head of the Oakland Housing Authority, spent more than 20 years running housing projects crippled by blight and patrolled by a criminal gang masquerading as a security service; at one point in 1991, one-quarter of the city's housing police had been found guilty of felony charges in federal court. Joe Samuels, Oakland's police chief in the 1990s, practically slept through his tenure as crack cocaine consumed the city. Every time someone moved to hold those leaders to account, the faithful at Allen Temple would storm City Hall and accuse critics of racism.
Nowhere was this policy of benign neglect more destructive than in the Oakland schools. As students posted dismal grades, stories of petty corruption abounded. A maintenance crew was accused of running a private house-painting business on district time, with maintenance trucks and equipment. One businessman connected to the school district allegedly ran a fitness club with sports equipment from Oakland Technical High School.
As the scandals mounted, attorney Dan Siegel was brought in as part of a team charged with reforming district operations, but the cronies on the school board, he says, fought him every step of the way. "There were employees in the janitors union who flatly refused to work, and they were protected from any kind of punishment by some of the school board members," he recalls. "And it was again in racial terms. If you fired this employee, it was because you were a racist, not because they refused to work."
According to Bruce Cain, the director of UC-Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, Oakland's patronage regime is hardly unique. Cronyism and political favors, he says, are the hallmarks of any machine that rises out of an impoverished community. Brahmin good-government activists have the luxury of promoting civic ethics because they've already built bourgeois lives for themselves; Buddy Cianci, the former mayor of Providence, R.I., used to call them members of the Lucky Sperm Club. Political machines built by the poor, meanwhile, are run not so much on idealism as on getting a piece of the material action.
"The history of political machines for poor and minorities is that they don't just rely on ideological incentives," Cain says. "What they reveal are the material benefits of politics: What's the bottom line? Are they going to get that community center? Better roads? Are their cousins going to get a better job? It's the material aspect of politics, whether you go back to Tammany Hall or more contemporary machines."
As a member of the state Assembly, Elihu Harris, an African-American, and Oakland's mayor from 1990 to 1998, helped lead the charge to root out district corruption. But he has a certain sympathy for his opponents' point of view. After all, the white establishments they displaced set the gold standard for corruption. The Knowland family, which owned the Oakland Tribune and dominated the city's establishment until the late '60s, handpicked candidates for political office, conducted the City Council's business over dinner at waterfront restaurants, and dispensed favors and patronage like candy. Many black leaders felt that good-government activists discovered ethics just in time to spoil their turn to feed from the trough.
"There had always been a system of favoritism based on who you knew," Harris says. "That's not abnormal. But the difference was, Why are they trying to change the rules now that we're in charge? Principals are always hired based on who they knew. But suddenly everyone noticed what the black folks were doing -- the same thing white folks had been doing."
This resentment underlies what may be the greatest scandal in contemporary urban politics: the slow decay of the Los Angeles Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.
Opened in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots seven years earlier, the hospital became a powerful symbol of community pride; a majority of its staff has always been African-American. But for 30 years, as the Los Angeles Times has reported, a culture of mismanagement has allowed staff to skip work, falsify time cards, kill patients with neglect, and even get into fistfights over patients on the operating table. Between 1999 and 2003, King/Drew paid out a remarkable $20.1 million in malpractice settlements.
In 2003, a clerk at the hospital pharmacy was arrested for stealing $150,000 in drugs, which he sold from his garage; the pharmacy director didn't know the drugs were missing until three months after the clerk was sentenced. One nurse used to have a janitor's aide mix intravenous medications for trauma patients. The chief of neurosciences earned more than $1 million in 2002-03 while performing 15 surgeries over the course of four years; hospital staff sold pirated DVDs in the hallways.
But whenever the county health department suggests the kind of drastic reform needed to turn the institution around, an army of community activists rally behind claims that a racist conspiracy is out to destroy a symbol of black pride. For the last year, their undisputed leader has been Rep. Maxine Waters, the exemplar of urban machine politics and racially charged rhetoric.
Waters is perhaps best known for leading the calls to investigate the CIA's supposed conspiracy to smuggle crack into black neighborhoods in the 1980s. But that kind of rhetoric was much less likely to resonate with Latinos, her fastest-growing constituency.
By 2000, the proportion of Latinos living in Waters' district had risen to 50 percent, far outstripping the black percentage of 36 percent. Unless the ethnic composition of her district somehow changed, a new generation of Latino leaders could someday challenge Waters for her congressional seat (and, if history is any guide, fall into the trap of patronage politics themselves). But that was before incumbents from both parties sat down to redraw the district lines. By the time they were finished, the Latino percentage in Waters' Los Angeles district had dropped to 43 percent, while the black population remained unchanged.
In another historically black district in Los Angeles, that of Juanita Millender-McDonald, Democrats reduced the Latino presence from 53 percent to 38 percent. According to Douglas Johnson, the author of a recent report on California gerrymandering for Claremont McKenna University, the results were hardly an accident. "In each case, they were looking to reduce the rapidly growing Latino population in their districts, presumably to avoid the threat of a primary challenge," he says.
Waters did not respond to requests for comment. But she was brutally frank in an interview on redistricting in the Los Angeles Times in 2001. "It is a foregone conclusion that the African-American seats are going to be retained," she said.
Not all black urban enclaves have passed through a phase of cronyism and incompetence. Under the leadership of mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, the city of Atlanta managed not only to spread jobs and contracts to African-Americans, but also to rebuild an urban bourgeoisie at a time when white residents were fleeing to the suburbs. Massive airport and transportation projects in the '80s both enhanced Atlanta's economic potential and gave black residents a share of the contracts, offering a chance for prosperity for everyone. While other black cities were rotting from crack and the flight of manufacturing industries, Atlanta emerged as the center of African-American middle-class life.
Today, there's no guarantee that the rise of a black suburban middle class will stem the destructive patterns of gerrymandering. California voters recently rejected an initiative to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians. But it may well lead to better political leaders. As the black middle class grows in suburbs along the state's urban fringes, leaders will emerge that must play coalition politics with white and Latino constituents.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the black population of the suburb Tracy grew from 855 in 1990 to 3,117 in 2000, and Antioch's black population rose from 1,626 to 8,824 during the same period. Meanwhile, Oakland's black population dropped from 163,000 in 1990 to 115,000 in 2004. "I went to an In-N-Out Burger in Tracy, and found that there were more blacks there than in Oakland," marvels Elihu Harris.
One new black leader is Federal Glover, a district supervisor in several Northern California suburbs. Although Glover has a small African-American base, he ran not as a black candidate but as a business manager with 23 years of experience at Dow Chemical. He conducts the mundane business of Contra Costa County -- traffic, growth, city planning -- with a burgher's civic-mindedness, because he can't rely on a captive electorate to stay in office regardless of his record. "My political base has grown from the diversity of the community, not just my identification as an African-American," Glover says. "People are really issue driven, and they're looking for leaders who work toward the betterment of their quality of life."
Back in Oakland, African-American residents long ago began to abandon race politics in favor of other values. In part, this is due in part to the slow emigration of black residents. According to the Census Bureau, 32 percent of the city now identifies as white, while 31 percent identifies as black. In fact, for the first time since the Second World War, African-Americans no longer constitute a plurality in Oakland. Aside from state Assembly candidate Sandré Swanson, no African-American leader has emerged with any chance of running the city or aspiring to higher office.
But the shift in Oakland's calculus of power is due also to the sense among black voters, who had lived through a decade of black leadership, that competence matters at least as much as ethnic representation. The trend began in 1989, when Harris ran for mayor on a reform slate and defeated three-term incumbent Lionel Wilson.
In 1998, Jerry Brown became mayor with a substantial majority; one of his first acts was to force the resignation of Police Chief Joe Samuels, a veteran of the city's racial patronage system. White progressive City Councilmember Nancy Nadel has represented the overwhelmingly black neighborhoods of West Oakland for years; the only time an opponent seriously challenged her was in 2000, and his campaign collapsed in disarray after he began publicly denouncing her as "that white woman." The old guard was driven off the school board years ago, and while a different species of machine politics continues to plague Oakland, its polestars are money and power, not race.
In fact, Barbara Lee, who replaced Dellums as Oakland's congressional representative in 1998, thinks that the very middle-class values growing among California's black professionals may be critical to a Democratic resurgence in 2006. All the worst qualities of the old black urban machines -- cronyism, incompetence, gerrymandering -- are the hallmarks of George W. Bush's presidency and his supporters in the House of Representatives.
Just as a black middle class is turning its back on such politics locally, so the American middle class is wondering how long the country can tolerate such ineptitude, arrogance and fiscal irresponsibility. If leaders like Lee can link middle-class desires for good government with the basic aspirations of the urban poor, the great gulf between Reagan Democrats and the identity politics of the civil rights era may finally be resolved.
"The shock and outrage at what we saw in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was widely felt, and is strong evidence that people believe that we all have a stake in the kind of society we live in," Lee told Salon. "Coalition politics is about expanding opportunity, fostering prosperity, and valuing diversity. And that is a message that the majority of Americans believe in."
Such analysis is exactly why so many Democratic leaders have pinned their hopes for resurgence on Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. In the last two years, the senator has emerged from the South Side of Chicago as an old-fashioned Truman Democrat, a foreign-policy hawk whose liberal domestic politics are focused on protecting and rebuilding the middle class. When he speaks of his vision for America, he doesn't dwell on the country's history of racism or exploitation, and he doesn't flog his personal journey as an African-American. Instead, he speaks of possibility and American exceptionalism.
Standing at the crossroads of history, Obama said during his stirring speech at last year's Democratic National Convention, "I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair."
As the Republican leadership mortgages the country's future on debt, cronyism and religious divisiveness, Barack Obama may well become America's first truly national black politician.
-- By Chris Thompson
To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser
Rise of the new black leaders
A new generation of black politicians is striving to put racial patronage and civic corruption behind it, and unite an increasingly diverse nation.
By Chris Thompson
Ron Dellums is a legend in Oakland, Calif. Thirty-five years ago, he was a passionate young congressman who went to Washington and denounced apartheid and the Vietnam War. He represented the town that spawned the Black Panthers and embodied black anger and ambition in America. His endorsement virtually guaranteed victory for any progressive young politician, and while he personally transcended crude racial politics, he was also the most celebrated African-American in a hard-luck town.
This Oct. 7, after almost a decade of retirement from public life, Dellums returned to Oakland, climbed the stage at the city's community college, and declared he was running for mayor. "If Ron Dellums running for mayor gives you hope," he said, "then let's get on with it!" The room exploded with cheers and politicos fell sobbing into each other's arms.
But Dellums is an odd sort of savior. For one thing, he made it clear he didn't want the job and had agreed to run only because hundreds of his old comrades begged him. For another, he's so, well, old. At age 69, Ron Dellums put politics behind him long ago and rarely set foot in Oakland over the years. An entire generation has grown up with no idea who he is. But in this election he's the last real chance for a black mayor to lead Oakland, once one of the country's epicenters of urban black life.
The case of Ron Dellums epitomizes a historic change in American politics. Dellums himself was always more than a machine pol; in fact, Rep. Barbara Lee called him "the father of coalition politics" in a recent e-mail to Salon. But the fans who tearfully rejoiced over his entry into the mayor's race represent all that is left of Oakland's racial old guard. They evoke a time when Oakland and black legislative districts around the country were run by leaders who often set up racial patronage systems, tolerated corruption and ineptitude, and never had to worry about competitive elections.
But today, particularly in the West, an era of black political power centered in urban enclaves is coming to an end. Latino migration is supplanting traditional African-American majorities in cities such as Compton and Los Angeles, and a rising black middle class is moving into the suburbs. California's inner cities are becoming less black and the political machines that have run them for decades are gasping their last breath. The number of black members of the California state Legislature has shrunk from nine in 1990 to six today, and no black state legislator holds office north of Los Angeles County. Tom Bradley ran Los Angeles for 20 years, Willie Brown ruled over San Francisco, and black mayors presided over Oakland from 1977 to 1998; today, none of those cities can boast an African-American mayor.
While at first glance this may seem like an unsettling development, it is also showing signs of producing a more responsive, transparent and sophisticated generation of African-American leaders.
Beginning with the Voting Rights Act in 1964, a wave of gerrymandering carved out black legislative districts around the nation, making race-based redistricting a legal right. According to Ana Henderson, a former Justice Department lawyer who worked on voting rights issues, the act enabled minority plaintiffs who could cite racist voting patterns to force cities to draw " majority minority" city council districts. "If you can break the city down to districts, and have each councilmember elected out of a district, and you can draw a district that is majority minority, those minority voters are going to be able to elect a candidate of their choice," she says.
From the mid-'60s onward, a coalition of black Democrats and white Republicans began redrawing congressional districts by race. This alliance finally gave black politicians the power that is their natural birthright. In 1966, just six black congressmen held office; today 42 African-Americans sit in the House.
Clearly, African-American empowerment was a critical step in American democracy, and the promise of opportunity for millions of black citizens is hard to overstate. But black power also gave rise to the modern gerrymandering era in which incumbent politicians use computer demographic research to rig the drawing of legislative districts. In the West, gerrymandering coincided with a racial patronage system that allowed bureaucratic incompetence and corruption to fester, sometimes on a vast scale. In the South, the process squeezed out white Democratic leaders, ultimately helping the Republican Party retake Congress in 1994.
Today, gerrymandering poisons politics at every level, as operatives from both parties typically collude to create safe seats for their respective incumbents. In California, this has suppressed emerging immigrant communities, retarding the growth of basic democratic institutions. If Latino or Asian-American leaders can't achieve higher offices such as congressional or state legislative seats, as is often the case in gerrymandered districts in Southern California, they can't mentor a new generation of young leaders to take their place on school districts, city councils, and county boards of supervisors. Nationally, gerrymandering has crippled the possibility of political dialogue and compromise, as extremists from either side no longer have to appeal to those with moderate sentiments in their districts.
At the same time, however, urban patronage machines are showing signs of grinding to a halt. Black politics is maturing beyond the language of grievance and adopting an increasingly middle-class, entrepreneurial character. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of black-owned businesses grew by a staggering 45 percent. More and more black professionals are buying homes in outlying suburbs relatively free from gang violence and urban blight.
As they build middle-class lives, African-Americans are adopting middle-class values: an intolerance of corruption and an expectation of accountability from their political leaders. Having outgrown identity politics, they are forcing black leaders to run on their own merits in racially diverse districts. Throughout the country, they are demanding not just representative diversity but better government.
Nowhere is this more evident than in last month's reelection of New York's Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who received half the black vote and 30 percent of the Latino vote, despite challenger Fernando Ferrer's deliberate campaign as a Latino candidate. In the election's aftermath, reported the New York Times, national Democratic Party leaders said they "needed to shun the racial and ethnic politicking of the past."
The grand era of identity politics was an inevitable and important outgrowth of the civil rights movement. But one need look no further than Oakland to see how racial patronage devolved into corruption and incompetency -- and how the city has since discarded such politics and learned to demand results from their leaders.
Dec 12, 2005 Black power rose in Oakland in the early '80s, as Mayor Lionel Wilson built a slim majority on the City Council, and the Rev. J. Alfred Smith managed a portfolio of untouchable bureaucrats from his pulpit at Allen Temple Baptist Church. Harold Davis, the head of the Oakland Housing Authority, spent more than 20 years running housing projects crippled by blight and patrolled by a criminal gang masquerading as a security service; at one point in 1991, one-quarter of the city's housing police had been found guilty of felony charges in federal court. Joe Samuels, Oakland's police chief in the 1990s, practically slept through his tenure as crack cocaine consumed the city. Every time someone moved to hold those leaders to account, the faithful at Allen Temple would storm City Hall and accuse critics of racism.
Nowhere was this policy of benign neglect more destructive than in the Oakland schools. As students posted dismal grades, stories of petty corruption abounded. A maintenance crew was accused of running a private house-painting business on district time, with maintenance trucks and equipment. One businessman connected to the school district allegedly ran a fitness club with sports equipment from Oakland Technical High School.
As the scandals mounted, attorney Dan Siegel was brought in as part of a team charged with reforming district operations, but the cronies on the school board, he says, fought him every step of the way. "There were employees in the janitors union who flatly refused to work, and they were protected from any kind of punishment by some of the school board members," he recalls. "And it was again in racial terms. If you fired this employee, it was because you were a racist, not because they refused to work."
According to Bruce Cain, the director of UC-Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, Oakland's patronage regime is hardly unique. Cronyism and political favors, he says, are the hallmarks of any machine that rises out of an impoverished community. Brahmin good-government activists have the luxury of promoting civic ethics because they've already built bourgeois lives for themselves; Buddy Cianci, the former mayor of Providence, R.I., used to call them members of the Lucky Sperm Club. Political machines built by the poor, meanwhile, are run not so much on idealism as on getting a piece of the material action.
"The history of political machines for poor and minorities is that they don't just rely on ideological incentives," Cain says. "What they reveal are the material benefits of politics: What's the bottom line? Are they going to get that community center? Better roads? Are their cousins going to get a better job? It's the material aspect of politics, whether you go back to Tammany Hall or more contemporary machines."
As a member of the state Assembly, Elihu Harris, an African-American, and Oakland's mayor from 1990 to 1998, helped lead the charge to root out district corruption. But he has a certain sympathy for his opponents' point of view. After all, the white establishments they displaced set the gold standard for corruption. The Knowland family, which owned the Oakland Tribune and dominated the city's establishment until the late '60s, handpicked candidates for political office, conducted the City Council's business over dinner at waterfront restaurants, and dispensed favors and patronage like candy. Many black leaders felt that good-government activists discovered ethics just in time to spoil their turn to feed from the trough.
"There had always been a system of favoritism based on who you knew," Harris says. "That's not abnormal. But the difference was, Why are they trying to change the rules now that we're in charge? Principals are always hired based on who they knew. But suddenly everyone noticed what the black folks were doing -- the same thing white folks had been doing."
This resentment underlies what may be the greatest scandal in contemporary urban politics: the slow decay of the Los Angeles Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.
Opened in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots seven years earlier, the hospital became a powerful symbol of community pride; a majority of its staff has always been African-American. But for 30 years, as the Los Angeles Times has reported, a culture of mismanagement has allowed staff to skip work, falsify time cards, kill patients with neglect, and even get into fistfights over patients on the operating table. Between 1999 and 2003, King/Drew paid out a remarkable $20.1 million in malpractice settlements.
In 2003, a clerk at the hospital pharmacy was arrested for stealing $150,000 in drugs, which he sold from his garage; the pharmacy director didn't know the drugs were missing until three months after the clerk was sentenced. One nurse used to have a janitor's aide mix intravenous medications for trauma patients. The chief of neurosciences earned more than $1 million in 2002-03 while performing 15 surgeries over the course of four years; hospital staff sold pirated DVDs in the hallways.
But whenever the county health department suggests the kind of drastic reform needed to turn the institution around, an army of community activists rally behind claims that a racist conspiracy is out to destroy a symbol of black pride. For the last year, their undisputed leader has been Rep. Maxine Waters, the exemplar of urban machine politics and racially charged rhetoric.
Waters is perhaps best known for leading the calls to investigate the CIA's supposed conspiracy to smuggle crack into black neighborhoods in the 1980s. But that kind of rhetoric was much less likely to resonate with Latinos, her fastest-growing constituency.
By 2000, the proportion of Latinos living in Waters' district had risen to 50 percent, far outstripping the black percentage of 36 percent. Unless the ethnic composition of her district somehow changed, a new generation of Latino leaders could someday challenge Waters for her congressional seat (and, if history is any guide, fall into the trap of patronage politics themselves). But that was before incumbents from both parties sat down to redraw the district lines. By the time they were finished, the Latino percentage in Waters' Los Angeles district had dropped to 43 percent, while the black population remained unchanged.
In another historically black district in Los Angeles, that of Juanita Millender-McDonald, Democrats reduced the Latino presence from 53 percent to 38 percent. According to Douglas Johnson, the author of a recent report on California gerrymandering for Claremont McKenna University, the results were hardly an accident. "In each case, they were looking to reduce the rapidly growing Latino population in their districts, presumably to avoid the threat of a primary challenge," he says.
Waters did not respond to requests for comment. But she was brutally frank in an interview on redistricting in the Los Angeles Times in 2001. "It is a foregone conclusion that the African-American seats are going to be retained," she said.
Not all black urban enclaves have passed through a phase of cronyism and incompetence. Under the leadership of mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, the city of Atlanta managed not only to spread jobs and contracts to African-Americans, but also to rebuild an urban bourgeoisie at a time when white residents were fleeing to the suburbs. Massive airport and transportation projects in the '80s both enhanced Atlanta's economic potential and gave black residents a share of the contracts, offering a chance for prosperity for everyone. While other black cities were rotting from crack and the flight of manufacturing industries, Atlanta emerged as the center of African-American middle-class life.
Today, there's no guarantee that the rise of a black suburban middle class will stem the destructive patterns of gerrymandering. California voters recently rejected an initiative to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians. But it may well lead to better political leaders. As the black middle class grows in suburbs along the state's urban fringes, leaders will emerge that must play coalition politics with white and Latino constituents.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the black population of the suburb Tracy grew from 855 in 1990 to 3,117 in 2000, and Antioch's black population rose from 1,626 to 8,824 during the same period. Meanwhile, Oakland's black population dropped from 163,000 in 1990 to 115,000 in 2004. "I went to an In-N-Out Burger in Tracy, and found that there were more blacks there than in Oakland," marvels Elihu Harris.
One new black leader is Federal Glover, a district supervisor in several Northern California suburbs. Although Glover has a small African-American base, he ran not as a black candidate but as a business manager with 23 years of experience at Dow Chemical. He conducts the mundane business of Contra Costa County -- traffic, growth, city planning -- with a burgher's civic-mindedness, because he can't rely on a captive electorate to stay in office regardless of his record. "My political base has grown from the diversity of the community, not just my identification as an African-American," Glover says. "People are really issue driven, and they're looking for leaders who work toward the betterment of their quality of life."
Back in Oakland, African-American residents long ago began to abandon race politics in favor of other values. In part, this is due in part to the slow emigration of black residents. According to the Census Bureau, 32 percent of the city now identifies as white, while 31 percent identifies as black. In fact, for the first time since the Second World War, African-Americans no longer constitute a plurality in Oakland. Aside from state Assembly candidate Sandré Swanson, no African-American leader has emerged with any chance of running the city or aspiring to higher office.
But the shift in Oakland's calculus of power is due also to the sense among black voters, who had lived through a decade of black leadership, that competence matters at least as much as ethnic representation. The trend began in 1989, when Harris ran for mayor on a reform slate and defeated three-term incumbent Lionel Wilson.
In 1998, Jerry Brown became mayor with a substantial majority; one of his first acts was to force the resignation of Police Chief Joe Samuels, a veteran of the city's racial patronage system. White progressive City Councilmember Nancy Nadel has represented the overwhelmingly black neighborhoods of West Oakland for years; the only time an opponent seriously challenged her was in 2000, and his campaign collapsed in disarray after he began publicly denouncing her as "that white woman." The old guard was driven off the school board years ago, and while a different species of machine politics continues to plague Oakland, its polestars are money and power, not race.
In fact, Barbara Lee, who replaced Dellums as Oakland's congressional representative in 1998, thinks that the very middle-class values growing among California's black professionals may be critical to a Democratic resurgence in 2006. All the worst qualities of the old black urban machines -- cronyism, incompetence, gerrymandering -- are the hallmarks of George W. Bush's presidency and his supporters in the House of Representatives.
Just as a black middle class is turning its back on such politics locally, so the American middle class is wondering how long the country can tolerate such ineptitude, arrogance and fiscal irresponsibility. If leaders like Lee can link middle-class desires for good government with the basic aspirations of the urban poor, the great gulf between Reagan Democrats and the identity politics of the civil rights era may finally be resolved.
"The shock and outrage at what we saw in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was widely felt, and is strong evidence that people believe that we all have a stake in the kind of society we live in," Lee told Salon. "Coalition politics is about expanding opportunity, fostering prosperity, and valuing diversity. And that is a message that the majority of Americans believe in."
Such analysis is exactly why so many Democratic leaders have pinned their hopes for resurgence on Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. In the last two years, the senator has emerged from the South Side of Chicago as an old-fashioned Truman Democrat, a foreign-policy hawk whose liberal domestic politics are focused on protecting and rebuilding the middle class. When he speaks of his vision for America, he doesn't dwell on the country's history of racism or exploitation, and he doesn't flog his personal journey as an African-American. Instead, he speaks of possibility and American exceptionalism.
Standing at the crossroads of history, Obama said during his stirring speech at last year's Democratic National Convention, "I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair."
As the Republican leadership mortgages the country's future on debt, cronyism and religious divisiveness, Barack Obama may well become America's first truly national black politician.
-- By Chris Thompson
Newpapers Also Played Apart Of Slavery
Published on Thursday, July 6, 2000 in the Manchester Guardian UK
Slavery Link Shames NewspaperAmerica's oldest publication makes front-page apology for profiting from trade in lives
by Michael Ellison in New York
As corrections and clarifications go it was late and long, but America's oldest newspaper in continuous publication has apologised for its complicity in the slave trade nearly 180 years ago.
In an 1,800-word article on its (July 4th) front page, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut said it felt obliged to acknowledge that it had profited from advertisements for the sale of slaves and the recapture of runaways until at least 1823.
"We are not proud of that part of our history and apologise for any involvement by our predecessors at the Courant in the terrible practice of buying and selling human beings that took place in previous centuries," said Ken DeLisa, a spokesman for the paper, which sells more than 200,000 copies a day.
The adverts - which cost 25 cents for 10 lines in three issues in the mid-18th century - included detailed descriptions of scars, brandings and amputations.
One read: "To be sold, a likely, healthy, good-natured Negro boy about 15 years old. Inquire of T Green."
This was Thomas Green, who founded the paper in 1764 and who acted, among other things, as a slave broker.
The Courant's role in the trade was raised by Billie Anthony, a teacher whose students found 90 of the adverts while researching African-American history in colonial Connecticut.
She raised the issue after the paper ran a series of pieces earlier this year about an insurance company which apologised for having sold policies to slave owners.
"The stories about Connecticut's slave profiteers had a glaring omission: the Courant itself," said the paper.
"It was accepted practice. Slavery was so woven into the nation's economy and social fabric that such ads were probably less controversial than gun or tobacco marketing would be today."
But Ms Anthony said: "I will never, ever forget the looks of dismay on their [the students'] faces as they were scrolling through all the microfilm and finding these ads and for-sale notices. The complicity of the Courant in the slave trade is evident."
One black student, Andriena Baldwin, said she remembered coming across one listing a young boy, pigs and butter. "We just stood still for, like, five minutes.
"We were just shocked that they would put a person in the same category as food."
Early editors openly embraced racism. Thomas Day, who bought the newspaper in 1855, wrote in one editorial: "We believe the Caucasian variety of the human species superior to the Negro variety; and we would breed the best stock."
Slavery came to Connecticut in 1640 and by 1774 the state had more blacks than any other New England colony: about 6,500, or 3% of the population. As a rule they were treated better than those in the southern states.
But in a 1798 autobiography, Venture Smith, a former slave, wrote of a beating from his master: "I received a most violent stroke on the crown of my head with a club 2ft long and as large around as a chair post . . . the scar of it remains to this day."
Slavery - what the American south called its "peculiar institution" - was banned in Connecticut in 1848, three years before the outbreak of the civil war. Abraham Lincoln declared slaves to be free in the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Richard Newman, a research officer at the WEB DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, said: "These ads have become extremely useful to scholars because they are one of the few places that describe slaves physically, their appearance, what type of clothes they wore, whether they were literate, what type of talents they had."
? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
###
Slavery Link Shames NewspaperAmerica's oldest publication makes front-page apology for profiting from trade in lives
by Michael Ellison in New York
As corrections and clarifications go it was late and long, but America's oldest newspaper in continuous publication has apologised for its complicity in the slave trade nearly 180 years ago.
In an 1,800-word article on its (July 4th) front page, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut said it felt obliged to acknowledge that it had profited from advertisements for the sale of slaves and the recapture of runaways until at least 1823.
"We are not proud of that part of our history and apologise for any involvement by our predecessors at the Courant in the terrible practice of buying and selling human beings that took place in previous centuries," said Ken DeLisa, a spokesman for the paper, which sells more than 200,000 copies a day.
The adverts - which cost 25 cents for 10 lines in three issues in the mid-18th century - included detailed descriptions of scars, brandings and amputations.
One read: "To be sold, a likely, healthy, good-natured Negro boy about 15 years old. Inquire of T Green."
This was Thomas Green, who founded the paper in 1764 and who acted, among other things, as a slave broker.
The Courant's role in the trade was raised by Billie Anthony, a teacher whose students found 90 of the adverts while researching African-American history in colonial Connecticut.
She raised the issue after the paper ran a series of pieces earlier this year about an insurance company which apologised for having sold policies to slave owners.
"The stories about Connecticut's slave profiteers had a glaring omission: the Courant itself," said the paper.
"It was accepted practice. Slavery was so woven into the nation's economy and social fabric that such ads were probably less controversial than gun or tobacco marketing would be today."
But Ms Anthony said: "I will never, ever forget the looks of dismay on their [the students'] faces as they were scrolling through all the microfilm and finding these ads and for-sale notices. The complicity of the Courant in the slave trade is evident."
One black student, Andriena Baldwin, said she remembered coming across one listing a young boy, pigs and butter. "We just stood still for, like, five minutes.
"We were just shocked that they would put a person in the same category as food."
Early editors openly embraced racism. Thomas Day, who bought the newspaper in 1855, wrote in one editorial: "We believe the Caucasian variety of the human species superior to the Negro variety; and we would breed the best stock."
Slavery came to Connecticut in 1640 and by 1774 the state had more blacks than any other New England colony: about 6,500, or 3% of the population. As a rule they were treated better than those in the southern states.
But in a 1798 autobiography, Venture Smith, a former slave, wrote of a beating from his master: "I received a most violent stroke on the crown of my head with a club 2ft long and as large around as a chair post . . . the scar of it remains to this day."
Slavery - what the American south called its "peculiar institution" - was banned in Connecticut in 1848, three years before the outbreak of the civil war. Abraham Lincoln declared slaves to be free in the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Richard Newman, a research officer at the WEB DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, said: "These ads have become extremely useful to scholars because they are one of the few places that describe slaves physically, their appearance, what type of clothes they wore, whether they were literate, what type of talents they had."
? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
###
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Office of The Ombudsman General
"WE FIGHT FOR YOU!"HELP FIGHT CORRUPTION BY SUPPORTING OMBUDSMAN INTERNATIONAL A United States of America Government Oversight Agency
The Police Complaint Center is a division of Ombudsman International, a United States Government Oversight Agency.
One of the primary focuses of our efforts is in the area of police corruption and abuse. We also accept complaints regarding elected officials and civil servants. Due to the increased number of police corruption and abuse complaints received by Ombudsman International, we have created The Police Complaint Center.
The Police Complaint Center of Ombudsman International accepts complaints from any individual regarding Police misconduct. The Police Complaint Center will investigate all valid reports.
Upon completion of the investigation, the Police Complaint Center will forward all findings to the Ombudsman General for direction. The Police Complaint Center works closely with the Internal Affairs Division of Police Departments, District Attorneys and private organizations throughout the nation to ensure that we obtain accurate information concerning any complaint received.
A representative of the Police Complaint Center will contact the complainant to verify pertinent information upon the receipt of any correspondence. Meetings with complainants are not always necessary and each case is individually reviewed by the Police Complaint Center staff.
As an integral part of our organization, The Police Complaint Center was created by the Ombudsman General in order to focus direct attention on this ever increasing phenomenon. All correspondence regarding this matter should be addressed to the attention of The Police Complaint Center. http://www.ombudsmaninc.org/
Did You Know...
that an ombudsman, "OM buhdz MUHN," is a nonpartisan public official who investigates people's complaints about government officials or agencies. Most of an ombudsman's work involves complaints of unjust or harsh treatment of people by police, prosecuting attorneys, or judges, and such matters as housing, taxation, voting, or welfare payments.
After investigating a complaint, the ombudsman may dismiss it or may seek correction of the problem-by persuasion, by publicity, or, occasionally, by recommending prosecution. Ombudsman, an Old Norse word translated to mean "administration-man" or "king's representative" was a concept developed in the Swedish constitution in 1809 as a means to curb governmental abuses and protect citizen's rights.
This later evolved into the investigation of unlawful or unfair acts and complaints about services. The Ombudsman then determines wrongdoing, mediates and/or makes recommendations for changes in practices and policies. Nearly 200 years later, this is the primary function of most Ombudsmen.
The definition of Ombudsman has also undergone a change. It is more readily translated to mean work "On behalf of Mankind". Now, Ombudsmen can be found around the world in government, educational institutions, business and even in industry.The idea of the ombudsman originated in Sweden in 1809. It has spread to Japan and to several European, Commonwealth, and newly independent countries.
Hawaii has a comprehensive ombudsman plan, and other states and some United States cities have modified plans. The idea also has gained popularity in large organizations, including corporations and universities. The ombudsman's growing popularity coincides with the increasing complexities of administration and with people's need for impartial and informal handling of complaints.
Contributor: David R. Berman, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, Arizona State University.
Black In The Age Obama
Click here: Op-Ed Columnist - Black in the Age of Obama - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/opinion/05blow.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
Op-Ed Columnist
Black in the Age of Obama
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: December 4, 2009
A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the now-famous phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. ...”
Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Charles M. Blow
Go to Columnist Page »Blog: By the Numbers
Multimedia
Graphic
Hate Crimes
Those words resonated with me recently while contemplating the impact of the Obama presidency on blacks in America. So far, it’s been mixed. Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.
Last year, blacks dared to dream anew, envisioning a future in which Obama’s election would be the catalyst for an era of prosperity and more racial harmony. Now that the election’s afterglow has nearly faded, the hysteria of hope is being ground against the hard stone of reality. Things have not gotten better. In many ways, they’ve gotten worse.
The recession, for one, has dealt a particularly punishing and uneven hand to blacks.
A May report from the Pew Research Center found that blacks were the most likely to get higher-priced subprime loans, leading to higher foreclosure rates. In fact, blacks have displaced Hispanics as the group with the lowest homeownership rates.
According to the most recent jobs data, not only is the unemployment rate for blacks nearly twice that of whites, the gap in some important demographics has widened rapidly since Obama took office. The unemployment rate over that time for white college graduates under 24 years old grew by about 20 percent. For their black cohorts, the rate grew by about twice that much.
And a report published last month by the Department of Agriculture found that in 2008, “food insecurity” for American households had risen to record levels, with black children being the most likely to experience that food insecurity.
Things on the racial front are just as bad.
We are now inundated with examples of overt racism on a scale to which we are unaccustomed. Any protester with a racist poster can hijack a news cycle, while a racist image can live forever on the Internet. In fact, racially offensive images of the first couple are so prolific online that Google now runs an apologetic ad with the results of image searches of them.
And it’s not all words and images; it’s actions as well. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2008 hate crimes data released last week, anti-black hate crimes rose 4 percent from 2007, while the combined hate crimes against all other racial categories declined 11 percent. If you look at the two-year trend, which would include Obama’s ascension as a candidate, anti-black hate crimes have risen 8 percent, while those against the other racial groups have fallen 19 percent.
This has had a sobering effect on blacks. According to a Nov. 9 report from Gallup, last summer 23 percent of blacks thought that race relations would get a lot better with the election of Obama. Now less than half that percentage says that things have actually gotten a lot better.
The racial animosity that Obama’s election has stirred up may have contributed to a rallying effect among blacks. According to a Gallup report published on Nov. 24, Obama’s approval rating among whites has dropped to 39 percent, but among blacks it remains above 90 percent.
Also, this hasn’t exactly been a good year for black men in the news. Plaxico Burress was locked up for accidentally shooting off a gun in a club. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was locked up for intentionally shooting off his mouth at his own home. And Michael Jackson died after being shot full of propofol. Chris Brown brutally beat Rihanna. Former Representative William Jefferson was convicted. And most recently, the “personal failings” of Tiger Woods portray him as an alley cat. Meanwhile, the most critically acclaimed black movie of the year, “Precious,” features a black man who rapes and twice impregnates his own daughter. Rooting for the president feels like a nice counterbalance.
However, the rallying creates a conundrum for blacks: how to air anxiety without further arming Obama’s enemies. This dilemma has rendered blacks virtually voiceless on some pressing issues at a time when their voices would have presumably held greater sway.
This means that Obama can get away with doing almost nothing to specifically address issues important to African-Americans and instead focus on the white voters he’s losing in droves. This has not gone unnoticed. In the Nov. 9 Gallup poll, the number of blacks who felt that Obama would not go far enough in promoting efforts to aid the black community jumped 60 percent from last summer to now.
The hard truth is that Obama needs white voters more than he needs black ones.
According to my analysis, even if every black person in America had stayed home on Election Day, Obama would still be president. To a large degree, Obama was elected by white people, some of whom were more able to accept him because he consciously portrayed himself as racially ambiguous.
In fact, commiserating with the blacks could prove politically problematic.
In a study to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences this month, researchers asked subjects to rate images of the president to determine which ones best represented his “true essence.” In some of the photos, his skin had been lightened. In others, it had been darkened. The result? The more people identified him with the “whiter” images, the more likely they were to have voted for him, and vice versa.
The Age of Obama, so far at least, seems less about Obama as a black community game-changer than as a White House gamesman. It’s unclear if there will be a positive Obama Effect, but an Obama Backlash is increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, black people are also living a tale of two actions: grin and bear it.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 5, 2009, on page A19 of the New York edition.
Op-Ed Columnist
Black in the Age of Obama
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: December 4, 2009
A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the now-famous phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. ...”
Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Charles M. Blow
Go to Columnist Page »Blog: By the Numbers
Multimedia
Graphic
Hate Crimes
Those words resonated with me recently while contemplating the impact of the Obama presidency on blacks in America. So far, it’s been mixed. Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.
Last year, blacks dared to dream anew, envisioning a future in which Obama’s election would be the catalyst for an era of prosperity and more racial harmony. Now that the election’s afterglow has nearly faded, the hysteria of hope is being ground against the hard stone of reality. Things have not gotten better. In many ways, they’ve gotten worse.
The recession, for one, has dealt a particularly punishing and uneven hand to blacks.
A May report from the Pew Research Center found that blacks were the most likely to get higher-priced subprime loans, leading to higher foreclosure rates. In fact, blacks have displaced Hispanics as the group with the lowest homeownership rates.
According to the most recent jobs data, not only is the unemployment rate for blacks nearly twice that of whites, the gap in some important demographics has widened rapidly since Obama took office. The unemployment rate over that time for white college graduates under 24 years old grew by about 20 percent. For their black cohorts, the rate grew by about twice that much.
And a report published last month by the Department of Agriculture found that in 2008, “food insecurity” for American households had risen to record levels, with black children being the most likely to experience that food insecurity.
Things on the racial front are just as bad.
We are now inundated with examples of overt racism on a scale to which we are unaccustomed. Any protester with a racist poster can hijack a news cycle, while a racist image can live forever on the Internet. In fact, racially offensive images of the first couple are so prolific online that Google now runs an apologetic ad with the results of image searches of them.
And it’s not all words and images; it’s actions as well. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2008 hate crimes data released last week, anti-black hate crimes rose 4 percent from 2007, while the combined hate crimes against all other racial categories declined 11 percent. If you look at the two-year trend, which would include Obama’s ascension as a candidate, anti-black hate crimes have risen 8 percent, while those against the other racial groups have fallen 19 percent.
This has had a sobering effect on blacks. According to a Nov. 9 report from Gallup, last summer 23 percent of blacks thought that race relations would get a lot better with the election of Obama. Now less than half that percentage says that things have actually gotten a lot better.
The racial animosity that Obama’s election has stirred up may have contributed to a rallying effect among blacks. According to a Gallup report published on Nov. 24, Obama’s approval rating among whites has dropped to 39 percent, but among blacks it remains above 90 percent.
Also, this hasn’t exactly been a good year for black men in the news. Plaxico Burress was locked up for accidentally shooting off a gun in a club. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was locked up for intentionally shooting off his mouth at his own home. And Michael Jackson died after being shot full of propofol. Chris Brown brutally beat Rihanna. Former Representative William Jefferson was convicted. And most recently, the “personal failings” of Tiger Woods portray him as an alley cat. Meanwhile, the most critically acclaimed black movie of the year, “Precious,” features a black man who rapes and twice impregnates his own daughter. Rooting for the president feels like a nice counterbalance.
However, the rallying creates a conundrum for blacks: how to air anxiety without further arming Obama’s enemies. This dilemma has rendered blacks virtually voiceless on some pressing issues at a time when their voices would have presumably held greater sway.
This means that Obama can get away with doing almost nothing to specifically address issues important to African-Americans and instead focus on the white voters he’s losing in droves. This has not gone unnoticed. In the Nov. 9 Gallup poll, the number of blacks who felt that Obama would not go far enough in promoting efforts to aid the black community jumped 60 percent from last summer to now.
The hard truth is that Obama needs white voters more than he needs black ones.
According to my analysis, even if every black person in America had stayed home on Election Day, Obama would still be president. To a large degree, Obama was elected by white people, some of whom were more able to accept him because he consciously portrayed himself as racially ambiguous.
In fact, commiserating with the blacks could prove politically problematic.
In a study to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences this month, researchers asked subjects to rate images of the president to determine which ones best represented his “true essence.” In some of the photos, his skin had been lightened. In others, it had been darkened. The result? The more people identified him with the “whiter” images, the more likely they were to have voted for him, and vice versa.
The Age of Obama, so far at least, seems less about Obama as a black community game-changer than as a White House gamesman. It’s unclear if there will be a positive Obama Effect, but an Obama Backlash is increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, black people are also living a tale of two actions: grin and bear it.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 5, 2009, on page A19 of the New York edition.
Friday, December 4, 2009
"I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars"
I KNOW WHY THE CAGED LION ROARS What Happens When Corrupt Black
Politicians Serve Themselves
Bishop L. J. Guillory, Ombudsman General, is one of our century’s most provocative political writers. He debuts his new book, “I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars” (What Happens When Black Corrupt Politicians Serve Themselves). He takes you on a journey into the unreal world of politics and power as he gives you a historical account of the events that landed some of California’s overly ambitious corrupt Black politicians in prison. It’s time for Black folks to rise from their comatose mind-set and make a personal commitment to save themselves and their families. Blacks had better flee toward Noah’s Ark because the flood of disenfranchisement and sell-out Black politicians will cause them to drown otherwise.
As you read “I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars,” you will see how Blacks have been sold into modern-day slavery with the help of corrupt, greedy, and trust-violating Black politicians. Yes, they throw a rock and hide their hand and when other Blacks speak out about their wickedness, they are accused of airing dirty linen. My response to that statement is--keep the linen clean. Guillory, a born servant, at the age of 11 was fighting for the crippled as he encouraged people to support and to walk in a March of Dimes walk-a-thon. He is no rookie when it comes to politics--he has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of it. He was married to one of the most corrupt politicians of our time. After exposing his wife’s corruption, he suddenly found himself “caged” behind bars. However, a few years later, his ex-wife and another corrupt politician who helped set him up, resulting in his imprisonment, found themselves behind the prison wall--doing their own time. You will come to understand that “sowing” and “reaping” is no fairytale.
Bishop Guillory, a modern-day political prodigal son, is back. His literary work provides authentic answers to the questions asked by many regarding the demise of Black corrupt politicians of Compton, Lynwood, and Carson, California. He is in no way bashing Black political figures. Guillory only brings to our memory the past. The past can serve us well--if we can remember to learn from it. The author, in his bold and provocative memoir, “I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars,” calls it like it is and does not apologize for instructing the public to keep a watchful eye on their public servants. You will clearly see who suffers when Black corrupt politicians serve themselves.
Contact Bishop Guillory at e-mail: ombudsmaninc@aol.com or visit us on the web www.ombudsmaninc.org
This review was written by Dr. Rosie Milligan, Milliganbooks.com
About Dr. Rosie Milligan Dr. Rosie Milligan, registered nurse, counselor/health consultant, author, and Ph.D. in Business Administration, has always been an achiever. Every career or business she’s been involved in has included helping other people accomplish what they wanted in life. Her motto, “Erase ‘NO,’ Step Over ‘CAN’T,’ and Move Forward With Life,” has been a motivating influence for hundreds to whom she has been mentor and role model.
The mother of three entrepreneurs—an M.D., a cosmetologist, and a health food store owner—
Bishop L. J. Guillory, Ombudsman General, is one of our century’s most provocative political writers. He debuts his new book, “I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars” (What Happens When Black Corrupt Politicians Serve Themselves). He takes you on a journey into the unreal world of politics and power as he gives you a historical account of the events that landed some of California’s overly ambitious corrupt Black politicians in prison. It’s time for Black folks to rise from their comatose mind-set and make a personal commitment to save themselves and their families. Blacks had better flee toward Noah’s Ark because the flood of disenfranchisement and sell-out Black politicians will cause them to drown otherwise.
As you read “I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars,” you will see how Blacks have been sold into modern-day slavery with the help of corrupt, greedy, and trust-violating Black politicians. Yes, they throw a rock and hide their hand and when other Blacks speak out about their wickedness, they are accused of airing dirty linen. My response to that statement is--keep the linen clean. Guillory, a born servant, at the age of 11 was fighting for the crippled as he encouraged people to support and to walk in a March of Dimes walk-a-thon. He is no rookie when it comes to politics--he has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of it. He was married to one of the most corrupt politicians of our time. After exposing his wife’s corruption, he suddenly found himself “caged” behind bars. However, a few years later, his ex-wife and another corrupt politician who helped set him up, resulting in his imprisonment, found themselves behind the prison wall--doing their own time. You will come to understand that “sowing” and “reaping” is no fairytale.
Bishop Guillory, a modern-day political prodigal son, is back. His literary work provides authentic answers to the questions asked by many regarding the demise of Black corrupt politicians of Compton, Lynwood, and Carson, California. He is in no way bashing Black political figures. Guillory only brings to our memory the past. The past can serve us well--if we can remember to learn from it. The author, in his bold and provocative memoir, “I Know Why The Caged Lion Roars,” calls it like it is and does not apologize for instructing the public to keep a watchful eye on their public servants. You will clearly see who suffers when Black corrupt politicians serve themselves.
Contact Bishop Guillory at e-mail: ombudsmaninc@aol.com or visit us on the web www.ombudsmaninc.org
This review was written by Dr. Rosie Milligan, Milliganbooks.com
About Dr. Rosie Milligan Dr. Rosie Milligan, registered nurse, counselor/health consultant, author, and Ph.D. in Business Administration, has always been an achiever. Every career or business she’s been involved in has included helping other people accomplish what they wanted in life. Her motto, “Erase ‘NO,’ Step Over ‘CAN’T,’ and Move Forward With Life,” has been a motivating influence for hundreds to whom she has been mentor and role model.
The mother of three entrepreneurs—an M.D., a cosmetologist, and a health food store owner—
Dr. Milligan lectures nationally on economic empowerment, managing diversity in the workplace, and male/female relationships. Her books, “Starting a Business Made Simple” and “Getting Out of Debt Made Simple” have helped many across the country. Her most recent release, "Creating A New You In Six Weeks Made Simple," is a must read. Dr. Milligan is also the author of ten other books.
Dr. Milligan has been an instructor in nursing education and was Director of Nursing for the College of Allied Health Careers and for the Los Angeles Job Corp Center. She assisted in writing the competency-based educational curriculum for Geriatric Nursing for the National Job Corp, former employee of United Health Plan (HMO) as Nursing Supervisor and Staff Development and holds lifetime teaching credentials for the State of California.
As an entrepreneur, economic empowerment activist, the Mississippi native owns a bookstore and Professional Business Consulting Services—providing consultation for new and small businesses and staff development training for corporations. In 1990, she started a publishing company, Milligan Books, where she has published over 100 new African-American authors in the past five years. Her publishing company is the fastest growing publishing company owned by an African American female in the nation.
A successful motivational speaker and trainer, she has appeared on numerous television and radio shows, such as Sally Jesse Raphael in New York; A.M. Philadelphia; Evening Exchange in Washington, D.C., Marilyn Kagan Show in Los Angeles, The Rob Nelson Show in Los Angeles and she’s a regular guest on Stevie Wonder’s KJLH Radio. She is founder and director of “Black Writers on Tour,” a columnist for “Black Issue Book Review Magazine.” Dr. Milligan Host her own Cable T.V. show "Express Yourself Literary Café"
Dr. Milligan was recipient of the 1996 Pioneer Women Los Angeles City Commission on the Status of Women and was also recipient of the 2001 Ervin Magic Johnson Master of Money Award. Being presently involved as Chairperson of the Community Advisory Group 8th District she is also a member of HOPE ToastMasters Chapter 1013 Los Angeles.
Dr. Milligan is obviously a woman who knows no limits and has proven this with her newest venture, Milligan Literary Agency. She sold her first work, The Shirt Off His Back, to one of the largest and most prestigious publishing houses. —Source Milligan Books (http://www.milliganbooks.com/biography.htm)
When Have A Judge Over Steped The Law
The Ombudsman Press Show - KNET 95.7 FM 1450 AM
Bishop L. J. Guillory, will Speak Out!
What can you do when a Judge Over Step The Law?
This Week's Guest is: The Honorable Arthur L. Burnett, Sr., Senior Superior Court Judge of the District of Columbia, with over 36 years on the Bench handling criminal, civil and family law cases.
He is currently on Sabbatical Leave from the Bench serving as the National Executive Director of the National African American Drug Policy Coalition, Inc. with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. to promote treating drug addiction and dependency as an illness rather than criminal prosecution of such persons for possessing or incidentally selling small quantities drugs to get their own supply to satisfy their craving or compulsion to use illegal drugs and to restore balanced equal justice to all citizens in our criminal and juvenile justice systems with such problems.
The mission of his organization is to eliminate disparity in access to and treatment for substance abuse and how individuals are treated in our healthcare system and in our criminal and juvenile justice systems.
When you want to know about Judicial Conduct or Law? Ask, A REAL JUDGE!
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Listen To The KNET 95.7 FM 1450 AM
The "Ombudsman Press Show" Hosted By: Bishop L. J. Guillory, D.D., the Honorable Ombudsman General, can be heard live on KNET 1450 AM & 95.7 FM or streamed live YourEastTexas.com, Sunday's from Noon-1 p.m.
You can also listen to a re-broadcast of the show in the PODCAST section of www.YourEastTexas.com.
The Ombudsman Press Show combines stimulating talk, live-callers, cutting edge interviews, and the un-cut local, state and national news that will inform East Texas taxpayers of the most paramount information that will keep them up-to-date when it comes to politics, religion, and entertainment.
About The Host - Bishop L. J. Guillory He is an Author (I Know Why The Cage Lion Roars) A Publisher (The Ombudsman Press Newspaper) T.V. Talk Show Host, Million Dollar Political and Entertainment Consultant, Bishop to a National Unitarian Prison Ministry, and Most of All he is an Autodidactic and Non-compromising Ombudsman General.
Guillory has been seen on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX NEWS. From the Los Angeles Times to The Washington Post - Guillory, has what it takes to keep the Public Informed and Entertained.
Guillory holds a Doctorate of Divinity in Religious Counsel from Bailey’s Temple and Christ Paradise Church Educational Institutional at Tyler, Texas.
As a Bishop and Special Events Consultant, Guillory has met numerous Hollywood Entertainment Executives as well as most Washington, D.C. Political Insiders. With his Hollywood contacts and his Humanitarian Ideals, he is destined to be Everyone’s “Hottest New Discovery.” And, that’s what you have to look forward to Every Sunday from Noon to 1 pm.
You can also listen to a re-broadcast of the show in the PODCAST section of www.YourEastTexas.com.
The Ombudsman Press Show combines stimulating talk, live-callers, cutting edge interviews, and the un-cut local, state and national news that will inform East Texas taxpayers of the most paramount information that will keep them up-to-date when it comes to politics, religion, and entertainment.
About The Host - Bishop L. J. Guillory He is an Author (I Know Why The Cage Lion Roars) A Publisher (The Ombudsman Press Newspaper) T.V. Talk Show Host, Million Dollar Political and Entertainment Consultant, Bishop to a National Unitarian Prison Ministry, and Most of All he is an Autodidactic and Non-compromising Ombudsman General.
Guillory has been seen on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX NEWS. From the Los Angeles Times to The Washington Post - Guillory, has what it takes to keep the Public Informed and Entertained.
Guillory holds a Doctorate of Divinity in Religious Counsel from Bailey’s Temple and Christ Paradise Church Educational Institutional at Tyler, Texas.
As a Bishop and Special Events Consultant, Guillory has met numerous Hollywood Entertainment Executives as well as most Washington, D.C. Political Insiders. With his Hollywood contacts and his Humanitarian Ideals, he is destined to be Everyone’s “Hottest New Discovery.” And, that’s what you have to look forward to Every Sunday from Noon to 1 pm.
Ombudsman International-USA
WHO IS OMBUDSMAN INTERNATIONAL - USA, AND WHAT DO THEY DO?
Ombudsman International takes complaints regarding public officials and/or public corruption by civil servants. In that regard, we contract a private investigator to investigate the complaint. Should the complaint be found to be true, we will forward the complaint and fact finding data to the Attorney General and/or other law enforcement agencies.
Our organization is not a political organization yet we do reserve the right to investigate claims of corruption, especially when the lives of our young people, the future of tomorrow, are jeopardized. It is our right and it is our duty, to investigate, report, and disseminate any findings of corruption.
Merely taking complaints, investigating complaints, and making those complaints public does not denote political involvement. Our organization is neither pro nor con, neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party. We are not supportive of corruption!
Our organization has found that the underlying root to saving our children from the dead-end prison system is predicated on the truth as well as the word of God.We also attend symposiums throughout the United States of America. These symposiums are specifically about issues relating to youth gangs, drugs, juvenile imprisonment, and prison reform.
State agencies, non-profit organizations, as well as churches sponsor these events. Attending such activities is very essential to our organization as it allows us the opportunity to participate in the dissemination of our materials as well as to come together with the others who are working in the area of crime prevention.
Another activity in which we participate is the prison/jail visitation program. We are permitted to visit on a one-on-one basis with the prisoner. In most cases, the prisoner would not receive a visit from anyone. We use this opportunity to fellowship with the prisoners. There is no reimbursement for any expenses (travel/meals) incurred by the volunteer when they visit a prisoner.
In addition we are "listeners" when parents of incarcerated youth come to the office to pick up information, vent, find resources, as well as to communicate their concerns regarding their loved ones.The office is also a distribution center for the many pamphlets, brochures and other printed material such as articles written by actual prisoners that we distribute without charge.
We, Ombudsman International, are completely for the benefit of the public/taxpayers. We are religious in nature because we put God first in everything that we do. We help people who need our help. We fight for people who otherwise lay down and do not fight for themselves.
When we visit prisons, we put God first. When we speak out at symposiums, we put God first. In the middle of the night, when we answer calls made by mothers whose children, specifically their sons, are shot dead in the streets and they have no direction as to how to get their many questions answered from the local police departments, we answer their calls and put God first.
VISIT US ON THE WEB http://www.ombudsmaninc.org/
Ombudsman International takes complaints regarding public officials and/or public corruption by civil servants. In that regard, we contract a private investigator to investigate the complaint. Should the complaint be found to be true, we will forward the complaint and fact finding data to the Attorney General and/or other law enforcement agencies.
Our organization is not a political organization yet we do reserve the right to investigate claims of corruption, especially when the lives of our young people, the future of tomorrow, are jeopardized. It is our right and it is our duty, to investigate, report, and disseminate any findings of corruption.
Merely taking complaints, investigating complaints, and making those complaints public does not denote political involvement. Our organization is neither pro nor con, neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party. We are not supportive of corruption!
Our organization has found that the underlying root to saving our children from the dead-end prison system is predicated on the truth as well as the word of God.We also attend symposiums throughout the United States of America. These symposiums are specifically about issues relating to youth gangs, drugs, juvenile imprisonment, and prison reform.
State agencies, non-profit organizations, as well as churches sponsor these events. Attending such activities is very essential to our organization as it allows us the opportunity to participate in the dissemination of our materials as well as to come together with the others who are working in the area of crime prevention.
Another activity in which we participate is the prison/jail visitation program. We are permitted to visit on a one-on-one basis with the prisoner. In most cases, the prisoner would not receive a visit from anyone. We use this opportunity to fellowship with the prisoners. There is no reimbursement for any expenses (travel/meals) incurred by the volunteer when they visit a prisoner.
In addition we are "listeners" when parents of incarcerated youth come to the office to pick up information, vent, find resources, as well as to communicate their concerns regarding their loved ones.The office is also a distribution center for the many pamphlets, brochures and other printed material such as articles written by actual prisoners that we distribute without charge.
We, Ombudsman International, are completely for the benefit of the public/taxpayers. We are religious in nature because we put God first in everything that we do. We help people who need our help. We fight for people who otherwise lay down and do not fight for themselves.
When we visit prisons, we put God first. When we speak out at symposiums, we put God first. In the middle of the night, when we answer calls made by mothers whose children, specifically their sons, are shot dead in the streets and they have no direction as to how to get their many questions answered from the local police departments, we answer their calls and put God first.
VISIT US ON THE WEB http://www.ombudsmaninc.org/
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Is A Public Lynching Legal In American?
Is A Public Lynching Legal In American?
Bishop L. J. Guillory, says…. “ Yes, in East Texas if you‘re an African American!”
Bishop L. J. Guillory, says…. “ Yes, in East Texas if you‘re an African American!”
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
St. Roger
Roger Gray
Roger Gray is a 40-year industry veteran, most of that time spent in his hometown of Houston. He has been a program director, news director, business partner, news anchor and talk host in both radio and TV over the years. Named one of Talkers Magazines Top 100 Radio Hosts in America for 2 years, he also started the first news department at Metromedia's KRIV-TV, was morning producer and anchor at KHOU, the CBS TV affiliate in Houston and Asst. News Director at Channel 39. Roger was for 5 years, a partner and news/program director for Gleiser Communications, a chain of 4 radio stations here in the Tyler/Longview market. His news department collected 26 AP awards in that time, including a couple for him. Roger traveled to the Middle East 3 times on stories, including covering the Gulf War and the Oslo Accords. Four assignments in Europe included the fall of the Berlin Wall, German Reunification and the Irish "Troubles." He's interviewed actors, authors, world leaders and every President Since Ford
According to CBS 19
I wonder if for a million dollars we can find out more about St. Roger?
It's funny how when ever a person start fighting the system how many guys like Roger Gray come out of the woods the help defend the system. Well, Roger I understand you have to do what they tell you to do! No hard feelings you do have to get your pay check. You attack and disrespect me and I will Pray for you .....PSALM 109
Roger Gray is a 40-year industry veteran, most of that time spent in his hometown of Houston. He has been a program director, news director, business partner, news anchor and talk host in both radio and TV over the years. Named one of Talkers Magazines Top 100 Radio Hosts in America for 2 years, he also started the first news department at Metromedia's KRIV-TV, was morning producer and anchor at KHOU, the CBS TV affiliate in Houston and Asst. News Director at Channel 39. Roger was for 5 years, a partner and news/program director for Gleiser Communications, a chain of 4 radio stations here in the Tyler/Longview market. His news department collected 26 AP awards in that time, including a couple for him. Roger traveled to the Middle East 3 times on stories, including covering the Gulf War and the Oslo Accords. Four assignments in Europe included the fall of the Berlin Wall, German Reunification and the Irish "Troubles." He's interviewed actors, authors, world leaders and every President Since Ford
According to CBS 19
I wonder if for a million dollars we can find out more about St. Roger?
It's funny how when ever a person start fighting the system how many guys like Roger Gray come out of the woods the help defend the system. Well, Roger I understand you have to do what they tell you to do! No hard feelings you do have to get your pay check. You attack and disrespect me and I will Pray for you .....PSALM 109
Deep East Texas
There is a Grave Need for Federal Intervention In ‘Deep East’ Texas!
By: Bishop L. J. Guillory, D.D.
Ombudsman General
Ombudsman International-USA
I know that many of the people who live and work outside of the East Texas area have no idea of what kind of Racist and Hateful treatment that African-Americans suffer. Some of which has to do; in part, with the results of the past presidential election.
However, please allow me the opportunity to share with you just a little of what I have found over the last eight months since the election of the first African American to the Office of the Presidency.
East Texas seems to pride itself on the fact that many of those living and working within the deep East Texas, have more than just roots here; they also have pride in the good old days (ways) “The Confederacy, Flags, Klan Country, being willing and able to conduct the last big fight against federal government takeover!”
In most, cases I have tried to keep my opinions to myself and just do the work that I came to the south to do; “Build A College” “Save Our Nations Youth From The Dead-End Prison System. However, what seemed to be happening in one area, was also taking place in other areas in the deep east part of Texas.
It has been well documented that the court system in east Texas have a history of its own brand of justice, which is swift and sure, in most cases driven by race, hate, economic or lack of economic resources. The state has some of our nations highest numbers of incarceration when it comes to African Americans males.
The fact that even the Texas Democrats are starting to change parties citing that; “The President’s Administration nor the Democrats in Congress represent and or reflect my ideas nor the people who I represent here in my District in East Texas!” Chuck Hopkins, Texas State Rep.
Chuck Hopkins, who was reelected as democrat just recently changed his parties; becoming a republican after the Obama lead Congress passed what may become first time national health care legislation.
If you were accused of a crime for which you did not commit; would you want fair and good representation? Many of the people who I represent complain that they did not get an attorney working on their behalf nor working to prove their innocents. Many of which are serving long prison sentences with no means and in some cases; not even the right to appeal their convictions.
I was one of those persons, which; is why I spend my life fighting for those who can not fight for themselves. Both within and outside of prisons throughout this nation. Ombudsman International, is a Not For Profit -United States Government Oversight Agency.
Ombudsman International, is not apart of the Government. We investigate complaints from United States Citizens regarding Government - Elected Officials, Judges, Police Officers, District Attorneys, and Concerns of Public Corruption.
At this point I feel based on the 27 years of working with, along side, and even at times against corrupt government officials; there is a grave need for Federal Intervention in Deep East Texas to prevent the continuation of hate crimes within the court system.
The Hate Crimes taken place here within many of the cities and counties involve the actions of school district board members, city council members, police officers, deputies working within the district attorney offices, and even within the courts where racist judges play a factor in more cases than not with regard to the outcome and lack of justice being served. I have witnessed first hand what happens in some of the courts in deep east Texas.
When an attorney refuse to work in the best interest of a defendant. Take the case of Truvia (African American Mentally ill Kid who is alleged to have killed his white teacher) where I have tried within to law to assist the family to get new and affective counsel in order that the kid can get the mental help that he truly needs.
As, a Bishop, an Ombudsman General recognized by members of Congress for my works across this nation, as father to a son now serving in the Army of this country. A odious Judge found cause to attack me. In fact, November 30, 2009, while sitting in court monitoring the Truvia case. Because, it is my belief that Jim Huggler is not working in the best interest of the kid.
I was asked to come to the judge’s bench for an unknown reason, as I am not a party to this case. But, have become the family spokesperson to deal with the media and others who have come out of the wood work to ask questions regarding Truvia’s background.
Once I was in front of what I believe to be the most Un-honorable and even in my opinion a racist judge. Judge Floyd Goetz ordered me to rise my right hand and swear to tell the truth for the information I was about to give to the court. I did! The Man (Judge) Floyd Goetz then attempted to intimidate me asking questions regarding my (wrongful conviction) incarceration and wanting to know how many members are apart of Ombudsman International. After telling the truth we have Thousands and Thousands.
“We have had more than 1.7 Million visitors to our web site www.Ombudsmaninc.Org .”
Since, I was not moved by his odious misuse of power and racist conduct, Judge Goetz banned me from the court and from the facility (a public building). Ombudsman International’s Attorneys are filing legal action on the judge and smith county regarding these unlawful actions.
The judge seem the have an issue with the fact that I have questioned publicly that the Truvia case, for which I am monitoring has a attorney that was at the center of criticism of a police shooting in September 2003. Truvia’s Attorney Jim Huggler, once worked as a depute district attorney in smith county.
Huggler, who oversaw the grand jury investigation of a case where three white Tyler police officers shoot and killed a 26 year old African American man; withheld at least one eyewitness from the grand jury. According to the associated press “Smith County District Attorney Jack Skeen said Huggler’s actions were improper!”
Huggler was also the attorney who represented Jamie Pittman who received a life in prison sentence. It was reported by one person close to the case that a Cook County District Attorney said; “Jamie Pittman, should have never been brought to smith county for trial.”
The fact that Huggler’s involvement in the Raibon’s death Grand Jury Case, which set off protests from Tyler’s African American community, and the Raibon family has brought serious questions and concerns as to why a man who’s ethic’s caused him the leave the Smith County District Attorneys office was appointed to a case of an African American kid who is accused of killing his white teacher.
It was reported by CBS 19 that Huggler contacted Attorney Smith in Dallas once he (Huggler) heard that I (Bishop L. J. Guillory) was working to hire Smith to replace Huggler. Only one of many the reasons for my decision to replace Huggler was the fact that Huggler brought a Dallas Reporter to the Truvia family’s home without permission or concern for the family.
More Information on this matter will be available after Ombudsman International’s Attorneys, overturn what may be a unlawful court order and legally address the civil rights violations which took place in court November 30, 2009. Please, feel to contact Ombudsman International
Contact Bishop L.J. Guillory (310) 980-0816 OmbudsmanInc@aol.com
Cc: Department of Justice -Civil Rights Div-
U.S. Attorney General
Congress
Texas Office of the Attorney General
Texas House of Representatives
NAACP
ACLU
By: Bishop L. J. Guillory, D.D.
Ombudsman General
Ombudsman International-USA
I know that many of the people who live and work outside of the East Texas area have no idea of what kind of Racist and Hateful treatment that African-Americans suffer. Some of which has to do; in part, with the results of the past presidential election.
However, please allow me the opportunity to share with you just a little of what I have found over the last eight months since the election of the first African American to the Office of the Presidency.
East Texas seems to pride itself on the fact that many of those living and working within the deep East Texas, have more than just roots here; they also have pride in the good old days (ways) “The Confederacy, Flags, Klan Country, being willing and able to conduct the last big fight against federal government takeover!”
In most, cases I have tried to keep my opinions to myself and just do the work that I came to the south to do; “Build A College” “Save Our Nations Youth From The Dead-End Prison System. However, what seemed to be happening in one area, was also taking place in other areas in the deep east part of Texas.
It has been well documented that the court system in east Texas have a history of its own brand of justice, which is swift and sure, in most cases driven by race, hate, economic or lack of economic resources. The state has some of our nations highest numbers of incarceration when it comes to African Americans males.
The fact that even the Texas Democrats are starting to change parties citing that; “The President’s Administration nor the Democrats in Congress represent and or reflect my ideas nor the people who I represent here in my District in East Texas!” Chuck Hopkins, Texas State Rep.
Chuck Hopkins, who was reelected as democrat just recently changed his parties; becoming a republican after the Obama lead Congress passed what may become first time national health care legislation.
If you were accused of a crime for which you did not commit; would you want fair and good representation? Many of the people who I represent complain that they did not get an attorney working on their behalf nor working to prove their innocents. Many of which are serving long prison sentences with no means and in some cases; not even the right to appeal their convictions.
I was one of those persons, which; is why I spend my life fighting for those who can not fight for themselves. Both within and outside of prisons throughout this nation. Ombudsman International, is a Not For Profit -United States Government Oversight Agency.
Ombudsman International, is not apart of the Government. We investigate complaints from United States Citizens regarding Government - Elected Officials, Judges, Police Officers, District Attorneys, and Concerns of Public Corruption.
At this point I feel based on the 27 years of working with, along side, and even at times against corrupt government officials; there is a grave need for Federal Intervention in Deep East Texas to prevent the continuation of hate crimes within the court system.
The Hate Crimes taken place here within many of the cities and counties involve the actions of school district board members, city council members, police officers, deputies working within the district attorney offices, and even within the courts where racist judges play a factor in more cases than not with regard to the outcome and lack of justice being served. I have witnessed first hand what happens in some of the courts in deep east Texas.
When an attorney refuse to work in the best interest of a defendant. Take the case of Truvia (African American Mentally ill Kid who is alleged to have killed his white teacher) where I have tried within to law to assist the family to get new and affective counsel in order that the kid can get the mental help that he truly needs.
As, a Bishop, an Ombudsman General recognized by members of Congress for my works across this nation, as father to a son now serving in the Army of this country. A odious Judge found cause to attack me. In fact, November 30, 2009, while sitting in court monitoring the Truvia case. Because, it is my belief that Jim Huggler is not working in the best interest of the kid.
I was asked to come to the judge’s bench for an unknown reason, as I am not a party to this case. But, have become the family spokesperson to deal with the media and others who have come out of the wood work to ask questions regarding Truvia’s background.
Once I was in front of what I believe to be the most Un-honorable and even in my opinion a racist judge. Judge Floyd Goetz ordered me to rise my right hand and swear to tell the truth for the information I was about to give to the court. I did! The Man (Judge) Floyd Goetz then attempted to intimidate me asking questions regarding my (wrongful conviction) incarceration and wanting to know how many members are apart of Ombudsman International. After telling the truth we have Thousands and Thousands.
“We have had more than 1.7 Million visitors to our web site www.Ombudsmaninc.Org .”
Since, I was not moved by his odious misuse of power and racist conduct, Judge Goetz banned me from the court and from the facility (a public building). Ombudsman International’s Attorneys are filing legal action on the judge and smith county regarding these unlawful actions.
The judge seem the have an issue with the fact that I have questioned publicly that the Truvia case, for which I am monitoring has a attorney that was at the center of criticism of a police shooting in September 2003. Truvia’s Attorney Jim Huggler, once worked as a depute district attorney in smith county.
Huggler, who oversaw the grand jury investigation of a case where three white Tyler police officers shoot and killed a 26 year old African American man; withheld at least one eyewitness from the grand jury. According to the associated press “Smith County District Attorney Jack Skeen said Huggler’s actions were improper!”
Huggler was also the attorney who represented Jamie Pittman who received a life in prison sentence. It was reported by one person close to the case that a Cook County District Attorney said; “Jamie Pittman, should have never been brought to smith county for trial.”
The fact that Huggler’s involvement in the Raibon’s death Grand Jury Case, which set off protests from Tyler’s African American community, and the Raibon family has brought serious questions and concerns as to why a man who’s ethic’s caused him the leave the Smith County District Attorneys office was appointed to a case of an African American kid who is accused of killing his white teacher.
It was reported by CBS 19 that Huggler contacted Attorney Smith in Dallas once he (Huggler) heard that I (Bishop L. J. Guillory) was working to hire Smith to replace Huggler. Only one of many the reasons for my decision to replace Huggler was the fact that Huggler brought a Dallas Reporter to the Truvia family’s home without permission or concern for the family.
More Information on this matter will be available after Ombudsman International’s Attorneys, overturn what may be a unlawful court order and legally address the civil rights violations which took place in court November 30, 2009. Please, feel to contact Ombudsman International
Contact Bishop L.J. Guillory (310) 980-0816 OmbudsmanInc@aol.com
Cc: Department of Justice -Civil Rights Div-
U.S. Attorney General
Congress
Texas Office of the Attorney General
Texas House of Representatives
NAACP
ACLU
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