December 03, 2015

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. 

NNPA News Wire Columnist 

The story is nothing short of remarkable. In one instant it told us more about the United States than any number of documentaries. Sherry McLain, a 67 year-old White woman from Tennessee was loading her car in a Walmart parking lot. James Crutchfield, a 52 year old Black man approached her seeking a light for a cigarette. McLain allegedly pulled a gun on Crutchfield allegedly fearing for her life. She later stated that she had never been more afraid.

Crutchfield is quite lucky to be alive. McLain was, interestingly enough, arrested, though she protested that this was unfair and that Crutchfield was the problem.

In reading about the case, I found myself thinking about the manner in which it illustrated so much about the reinforcement of racism. Cameras that filmed the incident apparently indicated no evidence of aggression on the part of Crutchfield, yet McLain felt that she was well within her rights to pull a weapon on an unarmed man.

The McLain incident reminds us that in the U.S., the presumption of guilt always hangs over the head of those of us of the darker persuasion. About a year ago I was driving through South Carolina on my way to a conference in Myrtle Beach. I said to my wife that there were certain places along the route where I would fear breaking down, not because they were cell phone dead zones, but because they were White areas and that I would fear for my life knocking on the door of some resident in order to seek help. While some would consider this paranoia, you only have to remember the tragic killing of Renisha McBride in Michigan for doing just that. Her car apparently broke down and she knocked on the door of a White man for help, only to receive a bullet as a reply.

It is not just that incidents such as the McLain vs. Crutchfield run-in, or the killing of McBride are unjust and tragic. These incidents flow from the deeply held view among so many whites that black people are dangerous, volatile and prone to violence. It is a notion that is rooted in slavery and the fear that the white population held that the slave might someday revolt and bring violent revenge upon Whites for the oppression we have suffered. This fear has existed wherever there has been slavery and/or colonialism. The fear of the Black; the fear of the Native American; the fear of the Asian; the fear of the Latino. In each case we are portrayed as unscrupulous and as wild as the worst animal, ready to pounce upon a White at a moment’s notice.

This is what is truly at the core of the gun debate. It has little to do with the 2nd Amendment. It has to do with the gun as a definition of Whiteness; a symbol of authority over, first the African and Native American, and later the Latino and Asian. It appears that Ms. McLain was following in this very sick and tragic legacy, and doing her best to reinforce it.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African on Telesur-English. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and at www.billfletcherjr.com.

November 26, 2015 

By Marian Wright Edelman 

NNPA News Wire Columnist 

On November 14, Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia announced the university will rename two buildings on campus named for two 19th century Georgetown University presidents: Thomas F. Mulledy, who in 1838 arranged the sale of 272 slaves from Jesuit-owned Maryland plantations and used the profit to pay Georgetown’s construction debts, and William McSherry, who also sold other Jesuit-owned slaves and was Mulledy’s adviser. The sale ignored the objections of some Jesuit leaders who believed using the money to pay off debt was immoral and their demands that families be kept together.

Georgetown’s action followed a student sit-in outside President DeGioia’s office but it was part of a longer ongoing process examining the university’s historical connections to slavery. The renaming was one step recommended by the Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation established by the President this school year. Recently student protesters at Yale University repeated calls to rename its Calhoun College honoring slave owning Vice President and South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, already a subject of campus wide discussion. For years the college featured a stained glass window depicting Calhoun with a chained Black slave kneeling in front of him. After complaints, the slave’s image was removed, but Calhoun’s remains, as does his shameful legacy that haunts our nation still. Georgetown and Yale are among the growing number of colleges and universities struggling to come to terms with their historical connections to slave owners, slave labor, and slave profits and the scars they leave on campuses and our nation today. What values do we want to hold up for our young as worthy of honor and emulation?

Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was the first Ivy League university to move forward with a large-scale investigation of its history under the leadership of former president Ruth Simmons. In 2003 she appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice to learn more about Brown’s past ties to slavery and wealthy benefactors involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Brown family included slave owners and slave traders as well as at least two members who became active abolitionists. The committee learned 30 members of Brown’s governing board owned or captained slave ships and slave labor was used for some of the school’s construction.

Brown is far from alone. In his groundbreaking 2013 book Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholar Craig Steven Wilder documented many of these connections. In the book’s prologue he says: “In short, American colleges were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest and colonial slavery . . . The academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”

The nation’s oldest colleges depended on direct and indirect wealth from slavery and the slave trade. Slaves helped build many university buildings including some at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. Students sometimes brought slaves to college to serve them, as George Washington’s stepson did when he attended King’s College in New York City, now Columbia University. Many university founders and early presidents owned personal slaves including Dartmouth, Harvard, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and more, and some colleges owned slaves. William and Mary, one of the slave owning colleges, produced one of the most awful stories Wilder shares—that of founding trustee Reverend Samuel Gray, who “murdered an enslaved child for running away”: “Rev. Gray struck the boy on the head, drawing blood, and then put a hot iron to the child’s flesh. The minister had the boy tied to a tree, and then ordered another slave to whip him. The boy later died. Gray argued that ‘such accidents’ were inevitable, a position that seems to have succeeded, as a court declined to convict him.”

Slave corpses were used in a number of the colleges’ medical and scientific experiments. In one of Wilder’s examples, Dartmouth College founder Eleazar Wheelock’s personal doctor arranged for a slave’s skeleton to be wired up for study and his skin tanned at the college shop and made into a cover for his instrument case. Ongoing university “research” throughout the nineteenth century bolstered many of the race-based claims used to support slavery.

Across our country this ugly and profoundly morally defective past is finally being brought into the light. Brown University’s Committee on Slavery and Justice said: “We cannot change the past. But an institution can hold itself accountable for the past, accepting its burdens and responsibilities along with its benefits and privileges.” More universities and institutions must follow Brown’s example and engage in a thoughtful process of truth telling of their own and America’s history in order to lift the indefensible blot of slavery on America’s dream which plagues us still. College students, faculty, and administrators seeking an honest historical accounting on their campuses are to be applauded. Only the truth will make us free and move us forward together.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information, go to www.childrensdefense.org.

November 19, 2015

By James Clingman 

NNPA Columnist 

Recollections of my 1995 article on the business of college athletics danced in my head when I heard the news about the University of Missouri football team’s refusal to play until the President of that University, Tim Wolfe, resigns or is dismissed. The players said, “due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experience” and his lax attitude regarding racial issues on campus, they would no longer participate in football activities. (Prior to the publishing date for this article, Tim Wolfe resigned.)

As I noted in 1995, and in several articles on college athletics and the billions of dollars they generate, money is the name of the game. When coaches of college teams earn several million dollars per year and half-billion dollar stadiums are being built, the actual laborers, the players, get lost in the shuffle.

Well, the players on the University of Missouri football team are far from being invisible as they are making a statement that has divulged an economic vulnerability. By the time you read this the situation may have been resolved, but even if it is there are lessons to be learned and actions to be replicated from this case.

According to an article on NBC Sports, if the University of Missouri had canceled the game with BYU, the Tigers would have been on the hook for $1,000,000. Everything boils down to dollars, if you look deeply enough, and the young men on Missouri’s team are illuminating that reality by their actions. The same thing could be done in professional athletics as well, in an effort to change the business as usual approach to racial inequities and mistreatment in the general society. It would be much more effective than t-shirts and hoodies.

Instead of wearing shirts with a nice-sounding slogan on them, or hoodies that connote illegal killings of Black folks, black armbands, or writing something on their shoes, Missouri football players chose the “nuclear option,” as some in Congress would call it. They put their prospective livelihoods on the line, and they put their scholarships on the line by actually doing something substantive rather than symbolic in response to their legitimate concerns about the conditions on their campus.

The sacrifice these young people are making cannot be overstated, and I commend them for being strong and committed enough to put core values before fame. I also hope the issue is resolved before this article goes to press; while they deserve our support and accolades, they should not have to suffer a loss of individual scholarships and their chances to make it to the professional ranks simply because they took a principled stand against racism. Other athletes have already fought that battle and some are still paying the price decades later.

Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Muhammad Ali, Curt Flood, and Craig Hodges, just to name a few, took their stands against the system and took the blows that their peers were unwilling to take. They paid a hefty price for having the temerity to stand up and speak out. The Missouri football players now find themselves in a crucible of consciousness, and we should stand with them and assure that they do not suffer the same fate as their forerunners. If they are “blacklisted” by the NFL, Black people—and other sympathizers should boycott NFL games.

I pray that someone other than the usual suspects, who are simply looking for the nearest camera, microphone, and a big check to boot, will come to the students’ aide and help them work out their situation in the long term. They have done their part by exposing the underbelly of racial mistreatment at the University, and they have also exposed the school to a financial liability that more than likely does not end with Brigham Young University. How many more games are on Missouri’s schedule?

The economic lesson from the players’ threatened “work stoppage,” juxtaposed against Jonathan Butler’s life-threatening hunger strike, is quite revealing. Butler’s life was virtually ignored, but when the dollars came into play, things changed right away. The message: A Black life does not matter, but Black dollars do matter. Considering all the critical issues facing Black people in this country, we would do well to use economic power instead of relying on political influence to make appropriate changes to our overall condition.

We should celebrate the Missouri players for taking the “road less traveled” as they fight for their rights on their campus; they chose substance over symbolism, action over passivity. Rather than merely wearing their complaints on their chests or their shoes, they chose to wear their concerns on their hearts by letting the world know they are quite serious; they took their protest to the only level that gets results—the economic level. Much respect to those young men and their supporters at the university.

James Clingman is the nation’s most prolific writer on economic empowerment for Black people. His latest book, Black Dollars Matter! Teach your dollars how to make more sense, is available on his website, Blackonomics.com.