Forty-one years ago this weekend, America was changed forever when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

  

Howard Dodson

The Crushing Tragedies of 1968

Everything came crashing down in 1968. April of 1968 to be exact. I had been on the high of highs since 1964. Took my first airplane ride that year.  Flew from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California.  Flew from 4° temperatures and snow in Philly to lovely LA and 75°.  Hating the cold as I did, I swore that I’d never live in cold weather again.

Spent three months at UCLA and a month in Puerto Rico before being shipped off to Ecuador, where I would spend two years of the most rewarding and transformative experiences of my life as a Peace Corps volunteer. New worlds, new people, new societies, new languages, new me! I had an incredibly successful tenure as a volunteer, organizing credit unions throughout coastal Ecuador. Organized 15. Twelve were still operating when I last checked a few years ago – 40 years later!!

I returned to Peace Corps headquarters in Washington in D.C. in 1966 and became one of the best Peace Corps recruiters in history.  Promoted to Director of Minority and Specialized Recruiting and Deputy Director of Peace Corps Recruiting nationally, I was at the top of my game. I had been offered jobs overseas with the Peace Corps and the USIA. My future was at its brightest. And then it happened on that memorable day on April 4, 1968. They killed Martin Luther King, Jr. and turned my life upside down.

I was running a recruiting campaign for Peace Corps in Philadelphia when I heard that King had been shot and killed. I took the first train smoking back to D.C. the next morning.

I made my way to Peace Corps Washington headquarters from Union Station. The fires and gunshots had already started and the city was in a total state of panic. The Peace Corps office was located at Connecticut and H Streets, two blocks from the White House and three blocks from “K” Street. “K” Street, a major thoroughfare and route to Virginia, had turned into a giant parking lot. Cars were parked-on the street, on the sidewalks, in the medians-engines running, doors open, passengers gone-gone walking-headed out of Washington. Smoke was seen at a distance in all directions. The crackle of gunfire, heard within earshot of the White House.

Within less than twenty-four hours, the U.S. military had occupied “Chocolate City.”  “Peacekeepers” with tanks and automatic rifles were stationed at checkpoints around the city- peacekeepers with weapons of war in the nation’s capital, trying to contain the rage and put out the fires ignited by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of peace.

I managed to make my way through the roadblocks and spend the night with my roommate and some friends in Maryland, just across the D.C. border. When I returned the following morning, the occupational force was at full strength. The fires were still burning and the guns were still crackling in random rhythms against the silence.

Wanted to help. Help in any way I could. Needed to do something to break the funk-to fill the void, the emptiness.  Needed to help make peace.

Made my way to a church that had been set up as a relief headquarters.  Emergency calls for food, clothing and sometimes medical care were being directed there. I needed to help make peace-to be of service. I volunteered again and took an assignment in the city.

Virtually everyone at the Church was white. The calls for help were coming from the black areas of the city where the fires were still smoldering and where gunshots still crackled. Someone was needed to make deliveries. I either volunteered or was drafted to run the military roadblocks and deliver food, clothing or other goods to those in need who had called. I made several runs in the white truck with the Red Cross sign on both sides.  I was stopped at several checkpoints by young, deathly scared, white National Guardsmen with weapons of war who thought I was a looter.

I made my way through the occupation and the funeral-King’s funeral-before I realized how deeply I had fallen-how much I had crashed. Trying to dig myself out, I started working on the Poor People’s Campaign and promised to join the Bobby Kennedy campaign as soon as I had finished a Peace Corps training project. The rains came and stymied the Poor Peoples Campaign. Another assassin’s bullet killed Bobby, and for all intents and purposes, my season of hope ended.

I was crushed by the accumulation of tragedies in 1968. The assassination of King, and the racial conflagration that followed it; the dashed hopes of the Poor People’s Campaign; the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the prospects of a Nixon Presidency all combined to plunge me into a deeper state of depression. At first I ran- took a flight to Hawaii to put some distance between me and the Kennedy assassination in June. A week or so on the beaches of Hawaii didn’t pull me out. I returned to Washington later in the month, still searching for a way out.

A chance encounter with a new television series started me on the path to recovery. In response to the King assassination and the turmoil that followed, CBS television sponsored a series of 120 half-hour programs on black history. Vincent Harding, a Columbia University Ph.D. history professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. and the memorable John Henrick Clarke, Harlem’s dean of lay historians of the black experience, co-produced the “Black Heritage” television series.  Even though it aired at ungodly hours in the morning (5 and 6 a.m.), I made it my business to watch every episode I could. Something about this plunge into the black past salved my psychic and spiritual wounds. I craved more.

I had been collecting copies of paperback books on black history since I started recruiting for Peace Corps in 1966. Every campus I went to, I made visits to the campus bookstores a must. Paperback books were still relatively new and cheap, especially if they were used.  I gobbled them up-books about black folk that I hadn’t known existed during my undergraduate and masters level studies. By 1968, I had a pretty good collection-most of them unread.

The television series convinced me that I might be able to find my sanity in our historic past if I immersed myself in these books. I shipped them off to Puerto Rico-over twenty boxes of them-and took off for San Juan. Spent a couple of months there and moved to the mountains in Mayaguez on the western side of the island-searching for my sanity, searching for meaning and renewed purpose in life, searching in the black past.

My unquenched quest in Puerto Rico led me to a new Ph.D. program in the History of Black People and Race Relations at the University of California at Berkeley. A “year abroad” in Atlanta, Georgia at the Institute of the Black World (in 1970-1971) transformed my sanity search into a sense of purpose and a vocation. My search for purpose and meaning of the traumas of 1968 put me on the path that would prepare me for my life’s work as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Howard Dodson, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library since 1984, is a specialist in African-American history as well as a noted lecturer and consultant.  His publications include Jubilee: The Emergence of African American Culture (National Geographic Press, 2002), In Motion: The African American Migration Experience (National Geographic Press, 2004) and Becoming American: The African American Journey (Sterling Publishing, Inc., 2009).

Learn more about the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

  

Reverend Dr. Susan Newman

The Day the Dream Died

Thursday, April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I was in the fifth grade at Adams Elementary School in Washington, D.C. The teachers began crying and screaming as they huddled together in the hallway, holding each other. We were told that Dr. King had been shot and we were sent home early.

As night fell and news of Dr. King’s death came across the radio and television, all of the clothing stores in black neighborhoods were in flames. Angry crowds of people ran up and down the streets, breaking windows of businesses-looting and running off with whatever they could carry. Black owners of barbershops, liquor stores, and other businesses spray painted “Soul Brother” on the front of their doors so the angry mobs would not steal and destroy their life’s investments.

President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the National Guard to keep peace and order in the streets. The city was under curfew. No one could be outside of their homes between 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.  This was the first time I ever remember seeing my father cry, as he and my mother sat with us on the sofa, listening to the news in tragic disbelief. Political and racial tensions in this majority black city were high. Washington was changing, and so was I.

A significant impression was made upon my heart during those days of grief, as people searched for the meaning of this tragedy. This man did something so wonderful, so meaningful with his life that everyone in the world seemed to be moved by his death.

During the days approaching his funeral, newscasters kept playing a clip from a speech Dr. King delivered the night before his assassination. He had gone to Memphis, Tennessee to support African-American sanitation workers who’d been on strike protesting unequal wages and working conditions. The look in Dr. King’s eyes, and the conviction in his voice stayed with me from that day on when he said:

“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

There was something birthed into my spirit that shaped my calling into ministry-do something that I felt so passionately about, that I was willing to live unafraid of dying.  And, thanks in large part to the unforgettable Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am.

The Reverend Dr. Susan Newman has had a 33-year career as a pastor, a community advocate, a teacher, a chaplain, and author. She is the President of Sincerely Susan Ministries, and is an Adjunct Minister of Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, DC. She is an inspirational, motivating and humorous speaker whose soul-stirring, thought-provoking insights on healthy relationships from a spiritual perspective have garnered nationwide attention and acclaim. Hailed by Ebony Magazine as one of the Top Black Women Preachers in America, She has been called “down-to-earth,” powerful,” “life-changing,” and “a reality check for the church.”

Learn more about Dr. Newman.

  

Esther Iverem

‘Bewitched’ and Bare Feet: Philadelphia Memories in Prime Time

Growing up in Philadelphia during 1968, most of my world revolved around attending Mrs. Johnson’s second-grade class at Harrison Elementary School, traveling on Sundays to my Uncle Jimmy’s church in South Jersey, riding my bike in the neighborhood and watching TV-lots of TV. So it figures that news of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King came to me while I was watching “Bewitched.”

Amid what must have been another episode about the modern-day witch Samantha and her doofus husband Darren, I remember a ribbon scrolling at the bottom of the screen that said something like, “THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING HAS BEEN SHOT AND KILLED IN MEMPHIS…” I was sitting with my older sister Elaine and I remember that we immediately jumped up and told our parents. We were ruling the TV and we had gotten the word first.

Though I was only eight years old, I was very aware that King’s death pertained to me and my blackness. I realize now that I was a sensitive child and in my young mind, racism (usually discussed in terms of “white people”) and injustice loomed large as an issue that adults talked about with knowledge and passion in homes, bars, sometimes  at church and on WDAS (AM and FM), one of two local black radio stations.

I lived in a somewhat racially-charged environment, with Frank Rizzo, the city’s police chief, always locked in controversy about the brutality of white officers in the black community. Philadelphia is a Northern city but, at that time, there were deep divisions between the city’s black community and some of its white, working class ethnic enclaves. (Two years after King’s death, not far from my home, Rizzo’s officers would conduct the infamous strip search of members of the Black Panther Party, large photos of which I saw in The Philadelphia Daily News delivered to our house.

And I had my own sense of the importance of King as a sort of royal man who was on TV speaking on these race issues of the day. I thought of him like an actual king.  He was pointed to as an example of the importance of education, reading well and speaking well.  But he was also a representative of very proper, middle class Negroes, which we were not. I remember my mother taking exception to one of his speeches we heard on the radio, when he seemed to mock preachers who were perhaps less eloquent than him and more filled with spirit in their delivery. She took his comments as a slap against more charismatic churches and denominations such as hers.

Much of what I understood about King, his death and his legacy came though the news and TV. But one lasting personal experience I will never forget after King’s death is approaching my elementary school and seeing, about a block away, a massive march of humanity spilling down the wide Girard Avenue. I ran toward it and watched from the sidewalk. My memory is that someone told me that the march was related to the Poor People’s March that occurred after King’s death, or that it was a march in remembrance of King. I remember being struck by the presence of so many white people in the March; some people were walking in their bare feet. I knew something had shifted in the world. I knew that something had changed.

Esther Iverem is a journalist and author whose most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press/De Capo). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is founder of SeeingBlack.com, a Web site for black critical voices on arts, media and politics. Iverem is a member of both the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and the Washington Area Film Critics Association. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also the author of two books of poems.

Visit www.SeeingBlack.com

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When the United States economy was more abundant, it was common for many of those who were affluent to denigrate government entitlement programs. Their contempt stemmed from two major sources: a doctrinaire commitment to an unfettered free market, and a profound objection to the expenditure of taxpayer funds for welfare, Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other programs.

Many people believe that America is the land of opportunity, where the good life is available to everyone who works hard. They also believe that those who fail do so because of personal shortcomings. The natural corollary is that those who followed the rules and succeeded should not have to forfeit a portion of their hard-earned gains to benefit the losers.

Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board

The present economic collapse has forced a reassessment of this cold-blooded ideology. Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, has been the longtime patron saint of anti-regulatory forces. In a 1994 congressional hearing on the regulation of financial derivatives, Greenspan said, “There is nothing involved in federal regulation per se which makes it superior to market regulation.”

Greenspan also refused to intervene by enacting regulations to temper the subprime mortgage problem. In April 2008, he wrote, “Bank loan officers, in my experience, know more about the risk and workings of their counterparties than do bank regulators.” While Greenspan claimed to have a feel for the financial markets, he seemed to have little understanding of the enormity of human greed.

Wealthy Americans have been concerned for some time that entitlement programs devour more than half of the budget. The mantra of the conservatives has long been to cut taxes, but they are aware that this policy is unwise without commensurate cuts in fiscal spending. Nonetheless, the costs of entitlements have proven to be intractable, and are actually projected to grow.

What was never predicted is that wealthy investors in the auto industry and financial institutions would one day be in line waiting for federal handouts to preserve their assets. Ironically, giving bailout-funded bonuses to AIG executives is sort of like allowing citizens to be on the dole. Perhaps now everyone can see that the role of government is to assure the welfare of all.

One thing to be learned is that greed has no morals. Wise regulations are necessary to hold this demon at bay. A free market system can function well only with restraints on the unfettered expression of greed.

Reprinted with permission from The Bay Street Banner, an African-American run periodical in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Much of the history of the Civil Rights Movement has focused heavily on the stories of great men like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and many others. These men are the embodiment of the movement. But the movement’s successes would not have been achieved without the support, dedication, defiance, intelligence and hard work of many women. Historically, black women especially had to contend not only with racial discrimination, but also with sexism from both white and black men within the movement itself and from the larger society. In spite of these challenges, black women at all levels of society continued to juggle women’ s work and race work. Here we showcase just a few women pioneers who have been instrumental to helping LDF fulfill its mission to defend, educate and empower African Americans and others seeking justice and equality in America.

Elaine R. Jones

As the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s first woman leader, Elaine Jones is a trailblazer known for her work as one of the first African-American women to defend death row inmates. The daughter of a Pullman porter and a teacher, Jones became the first black woman to enroll in and subsequently graduate from the University Of Virginia School Of Law in 1970. She turned down an offer to join a top Wall Street law firm and pursued her lifelong goal by joining LDF, where she spent all but two years of her career.

In 1977, Jones created the position of legislative advocate in LDF’s Washington, DC office, building a reputation as an expert negotiator and a passionate voice for the victims of injustice. She served as LDF President and General-Counsel from 1993 to 2004 Under her direction, LDF broadened its mission to include such emerging issues as environmental justice and health care reform, while continuing to work for educational equity, fair employment, voting rights, fair housing and an end to bias in the criminal justice system.

Marian Wright Edelman

America’s best-known and most highly-respected children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman began her career with LDF. In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Edelman worked for LDF first in New York, and then in Mississippi, where she became the first African-American woman to practice law in that state. After moving to Washington, DC, Edelman was instrumental in organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, leading her to focus on issues relating to child development and children in poverty. In 1973, Edelman founded the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), which has become a leading voice for policies and programs to lift children out of poverty; protect them from abuse and neglect; and ensure their access to health care, a quality education and a moral and spiritual foundation. The author of several books, Edelman keeps CDF financed entirely with private funds. Among her many honors are a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; more than 65 honorary degrees; and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement for her writings, which include eight books.

Constance Baker Motley

One cannot consider civil rights in America without paying homage to Constance Baker Motley, who brought her legal brilliance to the most important civil rights cases for 20 years, and became the first African-American woman to serve as a federal judge and in the New York Senate, among other historic milestones. While attending Columbia Law School, Motley volunteered at LDF. After graduating in 1946, she accepted full-time work for LDF, fighting housing cases to break down barriers that barred blacks from white neighborhoods, for the salary of $50 a week. LDF assigned her the James Meredith case in 1961, and the nation saw her escort the young student as he braved a jeering crowd to integrate the University of Mississippi. She called the day Meredith graduated in 1963 “the most thrilling” in her life. She won cases that struck down segregation in Southern restaurants and lunch counters. She lent her expertise to the briefs in Brown V. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case fought by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), led by Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg. A key player in the struggle to desegregate the South, Motley hung out with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was in jail; sang freedom songs in bombed churches; and spent a night under armed guard with Medgar Evers before he was murdered. Throughout her career and until her death in 2005, Motley was renowned for the quiet but powerful way in which she prepared and presented the lawsuits that led to greater equality for black people.

Lani Guinier

Lani Guinier became the first black woman tenured professor when she joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1998. The Yale Law School graduate had chosen her life path when as a child, she saw pioneering civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley on television escorting James Meredith through a hostile white crowd to desegregate the University of Mississippi in 1962. After graduating law school, she followed Motley’s example and joined LDF as Assistant Counsel. She left four years later to serve as special assistant to then Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days in the Civil Rights Division in the Carter Administration. After Ronald Reagan was elected, Guinier returned to LDF, where she became head of the Voting Rights program, litigating cases throughout the South, helping to win major victories in voting rights cases in Alabama and other southern states. She became one of LDF’s top litigators, winning 31 out of the 32 cases she argued. Guinier was thrust into the spotlight when President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Justice Department’s top civil rights post in 1993, then withdrew the nomination. Guinier has authored several books and won numerous awards, and in 1996 she formed a nonprofit organization, Commonplace, to create a dialogue about issues regarding race between the media and academic sectors.

Constance Rice

Civil rights crusader Constance Rice is acclaimed for her success in addressing the issues of inequity and exclusion. She attended New York University School of Law on the prestigious Root Tilden Public Interest Scholarship. After graduating in 1984 and serving as law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and at Morrison & Foerster as a litigation associate, Rice joined LDF in 1991. In 1996, she became co-director of LDF’s Los Angeles office. As a litigator, Rice is known for her work with class action civil rights cases redressing police misconduct, race and sex discrimination and unfair public policy in transportation, probation and public housing. At LDF, she filed a landmark case on behalf of low-income bus riders that resulted in a mandate that more than 2 billion dollars be spent to improve the bus system in Los Angeles. In 1999, Rice launched a coalition lawsuit that won $750 million to build new schools in Los Angeles, money that had been slated for more affluent, less crowded suburban school districts. Beyond her litigation work, in the 1990s, Rice served as counsel to the Watts gang truce and led a statewide campaign to save equal opportunity programs. Now co-founder of The Advancement Project, a public policy and legal action group that supports organizations working to end community problems and address racial and other barrier to equality and opportunity, Rice has received numerous awards for her work in expanding opportunity and advancing multi-racial democracy.

Sherrilyn Ifill

Recognized nationally as an advocate of civil rights, voting rights, and judicial diversity and decision-making, Sherrilyn Ifill is a Professor of Law at The University of Maryland School of Law who began her career as Assistant Counsel at LDF. She litigated voting rights cases, including Houston Lawyers’ Association v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court held that judicial elections are subject to the provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Ifill is renowned as an expert for her writings and work related to race, the need for judicial diversity and impartiality in judicial decision-making. Her writings on the history of racial violence and reconciliation efforts are widely praised, and her book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, is widely respected. In the spirit of LDF, Ifill has continued to litigate and consult on cases involving low-income and minority communities throughout her tenure at The University of Maryland School of Law.

Cissy Marshall

Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall is the widow of Thurgood Marshall, the former director counsel and founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  Over the years, Marshall has served as a member of LDF’s board and has helped the organization maintain ties to its founder, lending her name to and chairing many of LDF’s events. She was working as a secretary for LDF when the couple married on December 17, 1955. When Marshall Marshall, who is Filipino-Hawaiian, expressed her concern that an interracial marriage might attract negative attention to the LDF and to Thurgood, her husband-to-be replied, “So what?” The couple had two sons, Thurgood Marshall, Jr. and John Marshall, and they remained married until Thurgood’s death in 1993.

Vanita Gupta

Vanita Gupta was a young, talented attorney for LDF’s criminal justice practice division. She worked as the lead lawyer in the Tulia, Texas case in which more than a tenth of the town’s black population was arrested and wrongly convicted in a drug sting based the uncorroborated testimony of undercover officer. When the case came across her desk, Gupta organized a number of large law firms that worked with LDF on the case. Ultimately prosecutors conceded that they had made a catastrophic mistake, and led a Texas judge to recommend that every conviction be overturned because the detective was not a credible witness. The Tulia case garnered nation-wide attention and became a symbol of racial injustice in the country’s criminal justice system. After LDF, Vanita joined the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked on a landmark case, which greatly improved conditions for immigrant children and their families in the T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas.

Lia Epperson

Lia Epperson is an assistant professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where her courses focus on constitutional law, civil rights, and education. She worked as the director of LDF’s education law and policy group. While at LDF, she litigated in federal and state courts, advocated for federal administrative and legislative reforms, and co-authored multiple amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court in the areas of education and affirmative action. In addition, she represented LDF in several national civil rights leadership coalitions, including serving as chair of the Education Task Force for the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, a coalition of nearly 200 national organizations. Epperson’s research centers on constitutional interpretations of educational equity and the role of public schools and universities in making manifest the Constitution’s promise of equal opportunity. She has served as an editor of the Stanford Law Review as well as  the Stanford Law and Policy Review. Epperson is also the wife of Benjamin Todd Jealous, who is the current president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, LDF’s sister organization.

Jean Fairfax

Jean Fairfax is the former head of the division of Legal Information and Community Service at LDF. She was responsible for establishing and maintaining relationships between LDF and community organizations and attorneys across the country. She was also a civic leader, with careers in academia and philanthropy. As a dean at Kentucky State College and Tuskegee Institute, she organized youth programs in social justice, peace and community service in Europe, Israel, Mexico and the USA. Participating with her students in the 1940s in the work of the YWCA in the South, she demonstrated the important role of women in challenging institutional racism. Jean is revered for her work with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in post-World War II Austria and in its southern civil rights program. A professional civil rights worker for almost 30 years, Jean developed programs to advance civil rights, to educate low income and minority communities about their rights, and to implement civil rights laws and court orders at national and grass roots levels. Highlights of her career include involvement in the first desegregation of Mississippi’s schools and the integration of higher education systems across the South. She organized an interfaith group of churchwomen to expose failure of schools to provide meals to needy children, leading to reform of the National School Lunch Program. Since 1970, Jean has built a national reputation for increasing the participation of women and minorities in grant making institutions as donors, policymakers and recipients.

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor/Writer of TheDefendersOnline and The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

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The honors cascade upon Elaine R. Jones, woman of extraordinary accomplishment, like an avalanche schussing down a high mountain slope. But, albeit the honors, awards, compliments from prominent organizations, institutions and civic groups, Elaine Jones remains the same: An ebullient personality handling with aplomb a whirlwind schedule – while holding fast to and holding up the banner of the struggle for freedom.

Wednesday, Jones, the former President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), received yet another award: the George Bundy Smith Pioneer Award of the New York State Bar Association. The award was given by the bar’s Commercial and Federal Litigation Section during a reception at Lincoln Center, in Manhattan.

In introducing Jones, Bernice Lieber, president of the state bar association, and a partner at Arent Fox LLP, in New York City, said Jones’ career exemplified the “commitment to legal excellence and sustained public service” that the award was intended to bring to public notice.

There was a special poignancy to the moment, and not only because George Bundy Smith, whose distinguished legal career included service as an Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals for 14 years, was there and spoke briefly but movingly of his admiration for Jones.

The connection between the two goes deeper. George Bundy Smith, now a partner at Chadbourne & Park LLP in New York, began his career as an LDF attorney in 1961. He was hired by Jack Greenberg, who had just succeeded Thurgood Marshall as LDF President and Director-Counsel.

A decade later, Greenberg would hire a newly-minted University of Virginia Law School graduate: Elaine R. Jones.

Typically, Jones brushed past her own achievements in her acceptance speech in favor of a discourse that was part laser-like dissection of some of the nation’s current social problems, part pitch for greater support of LDF, and part revival-meeting call for her audience to continue the struggle for equality.

“Anything I have accomplished,” she said, with her usual vibrant force, “I have accomplished with the help and support of others,” adding after a moment that, albeit all the progress that can be justly celebrated today, it is “not enough.”

For example, referring to the composition of the federal courts, Jones was blunt.

“I don’t think there is a progressive side anymore. There’s no Left there,” she said. “There’s too much sameness there, and I’m going to do all I can as one person to change that. I’m putting you on notice,” she emphasized, as the gathering laughed in appreciation.

It was clear long before the speech’s last words that Jones’ credo remains what it has always been: “There is much work yet to be done, and the work goes on.”

Jones’ audience included a healthy contingent of friend and former colleagues from LDF. They included two former LDF Presidents and Directors-Counsel, Jack Greenberg and Ted Shaw, both now professors at Columbia Law School,  Ted Wells, co-chair of the LDF Board and partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Garrison & Wharton, Toni Fay, a former executive at Time Warner, Nannette Gibson, a senior member of the Board, Jacqueline Berrien, Associate Director-Counsel, and Board member Clifford Case III and his wife, Karen Dubno.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

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Carlotta Walls LaNier

When I entered the room, a few eyes followed me. I noted that the room was full, with about 40 African-American students and a handful of other races. Waiting for the lecture to start, I wondered: what does an iconic historical figure look like in real life? The image that kept playing in my mind was the vivid black-and-white footage of the Little Rock Nine escorted by armed U.S. Army soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division up the steps of the high school amongst an angry crowd.

To be honest, that whole incident seemed so far away and long ago that it hadn’t occurred to me that the members were still alive and living amongst us as everyday people. Carlotta Walls LaNier has been living in my home state of Colorado since she moved here to attend college decades ago. When I received the email from the BLSA (I’d signed up for their distribution list) saying that Ms. LaNier would be speaking, such issues as integration and segregation seemed so far removed from my life and the present. But I recognized the amazing opportunity to learn from someone that lived through segregation in the South, the youngest girl of the Little Rock Nine, and I didn’t want to miss it.

Ms. LaNier stood in front of us, a roomful of bright-eyed, optimistic law students, a 67-year-old woman with a robust spirit. As she spoke in her smooth, steadfast voice, I could see her mixture of strength and humility. Shoveling forkfuls of the soul food into my poor, hungry law-student mouth, I listened intently to her message of education, progress, hope and resilience.

At 14 years old, Ms. LaNier had walked into the middle of the integration battle. She endured harassment from her classmates, teachers and town members until she graduated. Of the nine students integrating Little Rock Central High School, she was the only one able to participate in the official graduation ceremony proceedings.

As a child deciding to integrate the school, she simply wanted access to the best education that she could receive. Labeling herself “an old relic of history,” Ms. LaNier told us she is “ready to pass the torch to a new generation to push ahead.” She shared with us that, as a woman and mother, she tried to teach her own children to have confidence, to set goals, and to see things through to the end.

She told us that she had not expected to see an African-American president in office during her lifetime. She was, however, “amazed” by the mobilization of the youth in Denver and in the nation as we voted Barack Obama into office. She also said she hoped that by the end of the year, we would stop calling him our first African-American president and simply call him President of the United States.

Listening to Ms. LaNier, I realized that integration wasn’t as remote as I had thought. I saw that it had directly impacted me. In Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, the U.S. Supreme Court found de facto segregation, which was considered insufficient grounds for judicial intervention, but the court asked Denver to start citywide busing to encourage racial balance.

In the very late 1970s, the school system bussed my older sisters into an inner-city elementary school, which they attended in the name of integration until the program was phased out. Later, my sisters were the only two white girls in elementary school class.  My parents always made the effort to surround us with people from a variety of backgrounds, and busing wasn’t against their ideas of inclusion.

I firmly believe that tolerance and education begin in the home, around the dinner table. My parents escaped the city when I was young because they wanted more land in the countryside. This dramatic change left my sisters feeling like outsiders, surrounded by white people for the first time since they were bussed. My sisters ardently took over supplementing my education with books and movies about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In elementary school, I knew of black people only through the books I read and the movies or television shows I watched. In high school, the civil rights movement seemed to be just a paragraph in my history textbook. However, my true racial education and experience with integration did not come from the classroom, but on the basketball courts on which I played in junior high and high school.

I came of age playing with people of all racial and cultural backgrounds through my high school team and in the AAU competitive leagues. Integration came from teammates and teamwork. For the most part, I was unaware of cultural differences because we were so focused on our common goals. Hearing Ms. LaNier’s story brought the remoteness of the past into the present.

Then, one of the black law students in the audience thanked Ms. LaNier for everything she had gone through because black students today wouldn’t be where they were without the Little Rock Nine. I wanted to thank Ms. LaNier personally, too, but I felt uncomfortable raising my hand. I didn’t know how my classmates would react because they might not think it was my place to speak about how her actions have touched my life. I wanted to express my gratitude, because I cannot imagine my life without my friends, whom I consider family.

The benefits I have received from integration are liberating for me. They have opened up worlds through the voices of my friends, worlds that I would otherwise not have known. I think about the people I love that I wouldn’t be able to have by my side in a restaurant or a classroom.

I recognize the need for us to encourage more young black people to pursue higher professional education, such as law school. When I entered law school in Denver, I was shocked that there was only one black male in my entire entering class, although my school has a healthy population of Arabic, Asian, Indian, Native American and Latino students.

Carlotta Walls LaNier left us with a message that more must be done to further legal justice. She encouraged us young law students to look to Thurgood Marshall as a role model, because lawyers are the foot soldiers and watchdogs of the law to ensure that human rights are being upheld and further progressed. When she said this, she hesitated, looking at the law students sitting before her. I wondered, was she directing this message solely towards the members of the Black Law School Association? Or was it meant for everyone? It is a universal message, and part of my American identity. Which leaves me to wonder: what is my role in the future in regards to encouraging not just more diversity, but participating in each others’ lives beyond mandated quotas?

What is my place in all of this?

I am not speaking from a place of naiveté or white guilt, but as a young, aspiring white woman attorney with a genuine commitment to strengthening my nation and living my life with integrity. I think about when I finish law school and pass the Colorado Bar exam. I will have the privilege of taking the Colorado Attorney Oath of Admission before becoming sworn-in and admitted to the practice of law. In that Oath, I will have to solemnly sear that:

I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Colorado;

I will maintain the respect due to Court and judicial officers;

I will employ only such means as are consistent with truth and honor;

I will treat all persons whom I encounter through my practice of law with fairness, courtesy, respect and honesty;

I will use my knowledge of the law for the betterment of society and the improvement of the legal system;

I will never reject, from any consideration personal to myself, the cause of the defenseless or oppressed;

I will at all times faithfully and diligently adhere to the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct.

These are words that I will be guided by throughout my life. Hopefully, all my peers will take these words to heart, too. As aspiring attorneys, we have a responsibility to our families, communities and peers to take a moment to think about how far we have progressed as a nation, and what we hope our individual roles will be in the future.

Because I did not raise my hand to address Ms. LaNier directly, now I am taking the time to thank her. In Women’s History Month, I pay tribute to you, Ms. Carlotta Walls LaNier, as a strong, black, trailblazing woman, mother, and historical icon.

Thank you, Ms. Carlotta Walls LaNier, for walking up those stairs that fateful day and seeing it through until graduation. Your courage in the past and encouragement in the present has had a profound impact on me. I am deeply grateful that I joined my fellow law students in hearing your story and for the inspiration and example that you have provided for us all.

D. Carene Bull is a law student at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law.

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For centuries in this United States of America, Lady Justice has decorated our courtrooms with her presence. In one hand she carries the balanced scales which symbolize the equal distribution of justice that will be served, and in her other hand she holds a sword indicating that she has the power to inflict punishment. For me, what always stood out was the fact that she wore a blindfold. In grade school, I was taught that when it came to this goddess icon and the law, our judicial branch would ensure that justice would be distributed objectively without any bias due to an individual’s race, appearance or class.

Former NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Director-Counsel and President Theodore M. Shaw greets Kemba Smith upon her 2000 release from the Federal Women’s Prison in Danbury, Conn. where she was released, thanks to the work of her family and LDF, after serving 6.5 years of a mandatory 24.5 year sentence as a first-time non-violent drug offender.

While incarcerated, it was hard for me to fathom how keeping me imprisoned until Jan. 5, 2016, at a cost of over $25,000 a year, would make America safer. The longer I was there,the more I realized this wasn’t about keeping America safer. It was about harsh, draconian punishment. One of the hardest things I ever had to endure in my life was giving birth to my son and watching him grow up from behind a prison wall. I often wondered If I would ever be a real mother to him versus just mothering him during our prison visits.

In December 2000, after 6.5 years of efforts by my parents and legal counsel from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF)-calling powerful people, writing letters, signing petitions, and organizing my community-a miracle happened. I was released from prison. President Bill Clinton decided that an injustice had occurred and he granted me executive clemency, balancing the scales for Lady Justice, at least in my case.

When looking back, I realize that in comparison to others I have known, I realize how fortunate I was to have been released after 6 years. I realized how the gift of freedom not only changed my life, but also my family’s lives. I know that my son couldn’t imagine being in the ninth grade with his mother still incarcerated. My freedom has allowed me to experience true love and an understanding of what a healthy relationship is. My freedom will allow my mother to watch me walk down the church aisle and then afford me the opportunity to dance with my father at my wedding reception in July.

Since my release, I have often felt like a sole survivor, continuing to be the voice for those still in the struggle-for the thousands of other women and men, many of them parents like me, caught in this web of excessive, inappropriate sentences that ruin lives without reducing crime. I have spoken on panels for many criminal justice organizations and congressional forums still discussing the same old issue of the War on Drugs. Most panels consist of researchers, scholars, attorneys, and judges, with me representing “the ex-offender” affected by these laws. I do this with focused determination and ambition although at times I feel like the Lone Rider in the room because no one can truly understand the urgency for change except me and those still walking through their valleys.

Kemba Smith

For two decades, harsh mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws have fueled the federal prison population. On the state level, New York’s “Rockefeller Drug Laws,” enacted in 1973, have long been regarded as among the nations harshest and have been compared to federal drug sentencing. Elaine Bartlett, who served a 16-year sentence, and Anthony Papa, who served a 12-year sentence, are survivors like myself of senseless drug laws and have been advocating for reform since their release.

For far too long, minorities have been overly penalized for the same or similar crimes committed by their white counterparts. Numerous studies conclude that draconian drug laws disproportionately affect minorities and generally entangle first-time offenders who have no history of violence. Although drug usage, sales and trafficking are serious issues in our society, the vast majority of cases burdening our courts consist of defendants charged with simple possession and other lower-level offenses.

After more than 35 years, on March 4, the New York State General Assembly approved legislation that would repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws and eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for first time non-violent drug offenders. As a result, this would allow judges discretion in many lower level felony drug possession crimes encouraging treatment over incarceration. Hopefully, the New York State Senate will approve this legislation to include retroactive sentencing. Re-establishing the moral force that should underlie the criminal justice system is what Lady Justice represents, continuing the progressive shift to a sensible drug policy in this country.

Kenba Smith is an advocate, public speaker and author who came to national prominence when she went from a sheltered, advantaged childhood to unknowingly becoming involved with a prominent crack cocaine dealer. Though she never actually handled any drugs, Smith was charged with trafficking 255 kilograms of crack cocaine in 1995. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund took Smith’s case pro bono in 1996.

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The successful candidacy of Barack Obama, an African American of mixed ancestry, has provoked an explosion of interest in and comment about Americans who are first-generation children born to parents of different racial or ethnic groups. This is especially so when those children have one parent who is white and one who is black.

Overwhelmingly to this point, the discussion in the media has depended on observations and assertions that are largely first-person or anecdotal. Such is not the case with Marion Kilson, who is white, and Florence Ladd, who is African American, both esteemed scholars and mothers of biracial children.

Their book, Is That Your Child? Mothers Talk About Rearing Biracial Children (Lexington Books), published last month, took the question mothers of biracial children are often asked as the foundation for a searching exploration. TheDefendersOnline asked them to discuss what they learned.  — The Editors

Our new book, Is That Your Child?: Mothers Talk About Rearing Biracial Children, is based on interviews with black and white mothers of biracial children. The book opens with our interview with each other, charts the challenges and rewards of rearing biracial children, and profiles black and white mothers with distinctive biracial parenting experiences. It concludes with suggestions for positive parenting strategies, which are relevant to all varieties of biracial combinations.

    

Ladd and Kilson

The parenting experiences of our cohort of black and white middle-class mothers span nearly five decades. In exploring the perspectives and stories of rearing biracial children, we clustered the mothers into five groups according to their children’s ages and the extent to which race is salient in their parenting. We have found that black and white women whose children are grown and have left home for the world of work and the creation of their own families confronted somewhat different parenting issues than women whose children are young and still at home. For white mothers, high awareness of racial issues has been acquired through observation, empathy, and personal encounters. Family histories and lifelong racial vigilance heightened the awareness of most, but not all, black mothers. Our fifth category is comprised of mothers, black and white, who appear to avoid race as a significant consideration in nurturing their children toward adulthood.

In recalling their parenting experiences, the racially-aware black mothers of children who are grown and have left home emphasize major societal issues and remember significant incidents rather than daily challenges. They talk of their efforts to encourage black identities in their children and their regrets for belatedly hearing their children’s untold stories. Some spoke of being welcomed by their in-laws, others of having received lifelong rejection from them. They anticipate that their grandchildren will inhabit a more multicultural world than the one in which their children grew up.

Racially-aware white women with older children have had more eclectic experiences with race than their black counterparts. Some of them bore biracial children in the 1960s, some in the mid-1980s, and most in the 1970s. Some are no longer married to the fathers of their children. Some have had work that has taken them and their families across the United States and abroad; others have lived in isolated rural communities as well as inner cities; others have spent their adult lives in affluent suburban communities. The diversity of their children’s ages, of their residential experience, and of their work histories mirrors the eclectic nature of their biracial parenting experience

Most of the racially-aware white women with older children encountered strong opposition to their interracial marriages from their natal families and many perceive that some African Americans resented their marriages to black men. They, like other mothers of biracial children, recount experiencing painful challenges to their maternal relationship to their children from strangers. These mothers emphasize their endeavors to ensure their children’s development as self-assured cosmopolitan biracial people.

Black mothers who are actively parenting children include both stay-at-home moms and professional working mothers, both suburban and urban dwellers, and both mothers of teenagers and mothers of preschoolers. While their personal life stories are quite different and their perspectives on race also vary, all these women share the perception that race matters in their lives and in the lives of their children.

These black mothers make conscious choices to build positive racial identities in their children when they consider where to live, how to select appropriate schools for their children and opt for activities that enhance their children’s self-worth.  In conversations with their children, they describe people with reference to relevant racial and ethnic attributes. They attempt to create an environment in which their children feel free to express their experiences and feelings. In short, they consider the issues that all thoughtful parents consider but with particular attention to their racial salience.

Racially-aware black women with young children at home experience the challenges and rewards of rearing biracial children in their daily lives. They confront the challenges that white blindness, racial stereotypes, and racial discrimination create for them as black women and as parents of biracial children. They also experience the rewards of assisting their children to develop as self-confident biracial Americans in a society that increasingly acknowledges their existence.

The white mothers with whom we talked who are actively parenting children include mothers of primary school students and mothers of high school and college students. They include single mothers and mothers living with their husbands and children. All have given considerable thought to fostering their children’s identities as persons of color, though they acknowledge their naiveté about black cultural and social issues. They readily acknowledge that people whom they encounter are “always trying to figure out the mystery of biracial children.”

These racially-aware white mothers with young children at home confront many of the same challenges as their black counterparts and also some distinctive ones. They, too, have the challenge of fostering positive biracial identities and confronting strained relations across the color line. They have the additional challenge of coping with their own cultural naiveté about race in the United States. Having grown up as privileged white people in the United States, they have learned about and experienced aspects of racial realities as adults. Since they acknowledge their experiential naiveté about racial matters, they tend to defer to their spouses in interpreting and strategically responding to racial issues as they parent their children.

While most of the women with whom we talked consider that nurturing racial identity and promoting self-acceptance in their children are critical aspects of their mothering, several women avoid reference to race in preparing their children for adulthood. They are loving parents who care deeply about their children’s development, but as mothers they do not focus on racial matters.

Some of these woman are African American, often light-skinned, and some are European Americans. While they may be aware of racial issues, as mothers they are reactive rather than proactive with respect to race in the lives of their children.  Neither they nor their children stress racial identity. Insulated by their socioeconomic status from some racial concerns, these mothers are nevertheless aware of the potential importance of race matters in the lives of their children.

Common Parenting Themes

Irrespective of whether a woman considers that cultivating racial awareness is significant in parenting, her children are racially ambiguous in the world outside the home where her relationship to them is likely to be challenged at one time or another. Most but not all mothers with whom we talked believe that it is important to prepare their children proactively for the vicissitudes that they may encounter around race as they mature.

These women stress the importance of providing children with multicultural experiences and relationships. Although many mentioned the importance of living in a multicultural and multiracial neighborhood where families like theirs and people of color are more common, few do. Almost without exception, the mothers with whom we talked perceive that American society is becoming more racially diverse and that future biracial generations will find social acceptance more readily than earlier ones.

White women, whether mothers of young or adult children, discussed the opposition of their natal families to their interracial marriages more often than black women. Usually, but not always, white families eventually accepted the biracial family. Yet both black women with Jewish spouses and white Jewish women more frequently experienced protracted and unrelenting familial rejection than other women. Moreover, both black and white women of older children mentioned strained social relationships from both sides of the color line.

Mothers of older children recalled that as young parents, there was a dearth of information about biracial identity and issues available to new parents and fewer institutional supports for families like theirs than there are today. Citing the increased number of interracial marriages and biracial children, the women with whom we talked are optimistic about the social acceptance of children like theirs in the twenty-first century United States-perhaps accelerated by the President Obama’s diverse extended family.

Marion Kilson is a former dean of the Graduate School at Salem State College. She has written several books and many articles on African and African-American topics, including Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era. Florence Ladd is a former dean of Wellesley College and director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She is the author of a novel, Sarah’s Psalm, and her essays and poems have appeared widely.

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At issue in the case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, is a constitutional challenge to the Section 5 preclearance provision of the Act.  That provision requires jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to submit proposed voting changes to the Department of Justice of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals for pre-approval.  LDF is representing African American residents that live in the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number 1 (“MUD”).

The organizations’ friend-of-the-court-brief underscores the rule’s significance. “But for Section 5,” it says at one point, “… the ability of minorities to participate in our democracy would have been severely impaired.”

In 2006, after reviewing an expansive record, the Congress agreed with the need for Section 5 when it reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. The Northwest Austin district originally sued to ask to be exempt from Section 5. It’s now asking for the provision to be declared unconstitutional. Last spring the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the district’s claims.

The district’s brief to the Supreme Court also includes the assertion that, with the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African-American President, there is no longer a need for the Voting Rights Act at all.

But the brief counters that “No statute in our history embodies America’s commitment to democracy more clearly than the Voting Rights Act. Since 1965, Congress and five presidents have acted to create or preserve this statutory framework designed to prevent racially discriminatory barriers that deny or abridge our citizens’ right to vote.

“This case is the latest in a line of challenges  … [that have claimed the country no longer needs Section 5, the heart of the Voting Rights Act, to be the inclusive democracy that we strive to become … This argument cannot be reconciled with the evidence.”

Read more about the case on LDF’s website and view the brief (PDF). 

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