The Curry Report

February 10, 2009

Please visit my newly-designed Web site, www.georgecurry.com. The Newsroom section was created for hard-core news junkies, with dozens of interesting links conveniently located in one central place. The Resource Center is filled with useful links, including one for free legal forms, how to find jobs overseas, preparing for different types of standardized tests, figuring out distances between two cities, searching for college scholarships, debunking Internet hoaxes and so much more. Explore the updated site and tell your friends about it.

My new site was designed by Iverson Gandy, III, a young African-American entrepreneur who owns his own Web firm, Gandylabs. If you like what you see, give the brother some business.

To avoid filters from blocking receipt of this newsletter now or in the future, add george@georgecurry.com to your address book. You can scroll to the bottom of this newsletter for information on how to forward it to friends or update your e-mail address.

In This Issue

Black History Month Still Needed

Honoring Blacks Who Have Made History

Northern Blacks Prodded Lincoln to Free Slaves

EEOC Struggles With Huge Workload

Holder Seen as a Chance To Right Racial Wrongs

Obama Snubs Black Press

Black History Month Still Needed

By George E. Curry

NNPA Columnist

An increasing number of people, including two of my journalism colleagues - Rochelle Riley and Cynthia Tucker - are proposing that we stop celebrating Black History Month. I strongly disagree and, evidently, so does Barack Obama, who signed an executive order designating February as African-American History Month.

"I propose that, for the first time in American history, this country has reached a point where we can stop celebrating separately, stop learning separately, stop being American separately," Riley wrote in the Detroit Free Press. "We have reached a point where most Americans want to gain a larger understanding of the people they have not known, customs they have not known, traditions they have not known."

Riley must be confusing Detroit, which is 81.6 percent Black, with the rest of America.

Cynthia Tucker is even farther afield. She says that Black History Month seems "quaint, jarring, anachronistic." Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tucker added, "Suffice it to say that the nation of Tiger Woods, Oprah and Barack Obama no longer needs a Black History Month."

Suffice it to say that this is sheer nonsense. The America of Tiger Woods, Oprah and Barack Obama is also the America where the Black unemployment rate is twice that of Whites, where the rate of poverty among Blacks is more than twice that of Whites and where the median family income for Whites is $25,000 higher than that of African-Americans.

The election of Barack Obama demonstrates how little White America knows about Blacks if they think he is the first African-American with the skills or education to serve as president of the United States. If students were taught about the contributions of Blacks in America perhaps they would know that W.E. B. DuBois earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. That same year, William Monroe Trotter, the crusading editor of the Boston Guardian, graduated from Harvard with Phi Beta Kappa honors, the most prestigious academic recognition in college. Yes, two African-Americans graduated from Harvard more than 100 years ago.

A year after they graduated from Harvard, the Supreme Court issued its famous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, upholding Louisiana's Separate Car Act requiring segregation on all common carriers operating in the state. Plessy wasn't overturned until the Brown decision outlawed "separate but equal" schools in 1954.

The Supreme Court decision notwithstanding, Jim Crow laws separating the races remained in effect for a decade after Brown, prohibiting Blacks from attending desegregated schools, being treated in the same hospitals, or being buried in the same cemeteries as Whites.

Although many American history textbooks carry accounts of the Plessy decision, many are riddled with lies, beginning with the notion that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America. First, Columbus discovered land already occupied by Native Americans. Second, he was lost, thinking he was in India. Consequently, we have two groups of people called Indians today because Columbus got lost.

Rarely are the contradictions about the so-called Founding Fathers taught to students. They were fighting for their freedom while enslaving Africans. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, enslaved nearly 200 Africans.

Even Abraham Lincoln wasn't the great liberator he is portrayed to be in the history books. In fact, he said during one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ... I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

Were you ever taught that about Lincoln in school? Today's students are not being taught that either, which is why we need Black History Month and more. I have posted on my Website, my Top 100 Books on Black History. Because the emphasis is on Black history, classics, such an Invisible Man and other works of fiction, are not included. Rather these are books that both Blacks and Whites should read in order to be fully educated about African-American history. If you read 10 books on the list - any 10 - you will learn more Black history than you covered over the course of your elementary, secondary and probably college education.

I understand the point Rochelle Riley and Cynthia Tucker were trying to make: Our history books should be inclusive and tell the history of all Americans, including Blacks. But the books aren't inclusive and simply pretending they are does not contribute to our education nor justify ending Black History Month.

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

Honoring Blacks Who Have Made History

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson

By Khalid Moss

� Coz Newspapers

February 9, 2009

DAYTON, Ohio -- Black History Month will never quite be the same.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama on Jan. 20, a transcendent moment was frozen in time. The nation watched a new era of black history - and perhaps world history - unfold before its eyes.

The father of Black History Month is Harvard scholar Carter G. Woodson. He started the project in 1926 to formally recognize achievements by black Americans that had been ignored, marginalized or redacted from mainstream documents.

Today, Black History Month not only recognizes individuals and events but also honors pioneers in the fields of science, art, education, sports, pop culture and politics.

Obama is America's first black president, but there have been other significant political and social firsts that blazed the path for his victory.

�First black elected official: John Mercer Langston, 1855, town clerk of Brownhelm Twp., Ohio.

�First black mayor of a major city: Carl Stokes, Cleveland, Ohio, 1967-71.

�First elected black governor: L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia, 1990-94.

�First black U.S. representative to the United Nations: Andrew Young (1977-79).

�First black Nobel Prize winner: Ralph J. Bunche, 1950.

�First black patent holder: Thomas L. Jennings, 1821, for a dry-cleaning process.

�First black to earn medical degree: James McCune Smith, 1837, University of Glasgow.

�Inventor of the blood bank: Dr. Charles Drew, 1940.

�First black astronaut: Robert H. Lawrence Jr., 1967.

�First black winner of Nobel Prize for Literature: Toni Morrison, 1993.

�First black Grammy winner: Count Basie, 1956.

�First black boxing heavyweight champion: Jack Johnson, 1908.

�First black Major League Baseball player: Jackie Robinson, 1947.

�First Masters golf champion: Tiger Woods, 1997.

�First black to play and win Wimbledon tennis tournament: Althea Gibson, 1957-58.

�First black to fly solo around the world: Barrington Irving, 2007.

Northern Blacks Prodded Lincoln to Free Slaves: Historian

By Cheryl Jackson
� Chicago Sun-Times
February 8, 2009

African Americans who lived in free states in the 19th century don't get enough credit for their roles in the efforts to abolish slavery, a historian said Saturday.

They were more aggressive in slavery protests than whites, particularly in the 1850s, which likely helped nudge Illinois' native son, Abraham Lincoln, toward issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Spencer Crew said in a lecture at the Newberry Library on the Near North Side.

"They didn't go out to Starbucks for coffee," said Crew, of George Mason University. "But it is the activism and efforts of the African-American community that helped influence what [Lincoln] thought about the institution of slavery."

As the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, and the rest of the country prepare to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth this week, Crew called for a renewed recognition of blacks' efforts 1� centuries ago.

Although many Northern whites opposed slavery, they still did not consider blacks equal to whites and didn't fight too hard to end slavery.

Blacks in free states, however, were spurred by laws that threatened their freedom, including a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act. The children of any fugitive female slave could be sold, no matter how many generations removed from the original escapee. African Americans often were assumed to be slaves unless a white person said otherwise. In addition, Crew said, slave catchers would abduct free black children and sell them into slavery.

Illinois, for example, banned blacks from relocating here and prohibited blacks from testifying in court, voting or serving in the military.

To fight back, blacks did everything from filing lawsuits to literally driving slave-catchers away, as a group of African-American women in Cincinnati did using rolling pins, shovels and washboards.

The Underground Railroad, a network of people who helped escaped slaves make their way to free states, included the Dearborn Street home of the wealthy John and Mary Jones.

"Clearly they are a part of the range of voices [Lincoln] hears about the issue and that he along with many other Americans began to shift their opinions about slavery over time," Crew said.

EEOC Struggles With Huge Workload, Diminished Staff

By Steve Vogel
� Washington Post
February 2, 2009

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged with enforcing the nation's job discrimination laws, is facing its largest caseload in at least a quarter-century with sharply diminished staffing and resources, according to commission and union officials.

The 44-year-old commission has been dogged by budgetary and staffing problems before, but union officials say the Obama administration faces a tough challenge in overcoming morale problems and an overwhelmed workforce.

Some allegations of discrimination based on race, religion, sex, age or disability are languishing for months because of inadequate staffing.

More than 95,400 charges of job bias in the private sector were filed in fiscal year 2008, up 15.2 percent from the previous year and up 26 percent from 2006. But the size of the EEOC staff, which is responsible for investigating the complaints, has steadily decreased in size and now numbers 2,192, down from approximately 2,850 in 2000.

As a result, the commission's backlog of unresolved cases climbed to 73,951, up 35 percent from the previous year's total of 54,970. Fewer than half of private sector discrimination charges filed in the last year were resolved within 180 days, a goal that is now so difficult to reach that the commission recently changed its target compliance rate from 72 percent to 48 percent due to the agency's higher workload and decreasing resources.

"The backlog keeps building, building and building," said Regina Andrew, an EEOC trial attorney in the Baltimore field office and president of the union local representing field office employees in the Washington area.

"If you have a staff cut of that magnitude, it does have a negative impact, there's no getting around it," said Stuart Ishimaru, an EEOC commissioner since 2003 who was recently appointed by President Obama as acting chairman of the body.

Nicholas M. Inzeo, director of the EEOC's office of field programs, said the crunch is felt in every EEOC office around the country.

"Would they tell you they're overworked? Oh yeah," Inzeo said in an interview at the new EEOC headquarters in the NoMa neighborhood of Washington.

Even as the number of discrimination charges soared, the EEOC filed only 290 lawsuits against private sector employers last year, down from 371 in 2006.

The lower number reflects the decrease in the number of EEOC attorneys and other staff, Inzeo said. "If we had more investigators to investigate and more trial attorneys to litigate, we would do more," he said.

Trial attorneys have more cases than they can handle, according to Andrew. "As a result of that, cases get put on the shelf," she said. "Evidence does get stale and witnesses move away. I would say not all cases get hurt by delay, but a lot of them do."

Lengthy delays can also leave complainants vulnerable to retaliation at their jobs. "For many employees, it can make them lose hope that anything will ever happen, and it has a huge chilling effect on other employees," said Gabrielle Martin, president of the National Council of EEOC Locals.

When Ishimaru was named acting chairman Jan. 22, one of his first acts was to send an e-mail to the staff asking for ideas on how the EEOC can best fulfill its mission of combating discrimination. "To succeed, we need to rethink the question of how well our Commission works," Ishimaru wrote.

By some measures, the EEOC has not been working well. The union awarded the EEOC an "F" for its performance in 2008. "Rock bottom staffing and record high charges of discrimination add up to another failing grade for the beleaguered civil rights agency," the National Council of EEOC Locals complained in a recent press release.

"This means if you knock on EEOC's door for help you can expect to wait a long time before anyone answers," said Martin.

Resources have languished over the eight years of the Bush administration. The agency's requests to hire support staff, investigators, attorneys, administrative judges and mediators to replace those who departed the agency have been largely unheeded.

"We just haven't had the money to replace most of them," said Inzeo.

The shortages frustrate many longtime EEOC employees who have seen their efforts to combat workplace discrimination suffer. "People say, 'I wanted to work at this agency because its work is important, but I'm so bogged down I can't get to hearings or I can't investigate my cases,'" said Martin.

"Generally speaking, people feel pinched," said Ishimaru. "People are tired of being told to do more with less."

Andrew complained the EEOC has been "sort of leaderless" under the previous chairman, Naomi Earp, a Bush appointee. "We do have a lot of hope that with new leadership, we can get the staffing we need," she said.

The Bush administration left one position on the five-member commission vacant for most of the last two years, leaving two Democrats and two Republicans on the board and often resulting in two-two tie votes. "Everything is pretty much deadlocked," said Martin.

Adding to discontent within the agency is the EEOC's move in November from its old location at 18th and L streets N.W. in the heart of downtown to its new headquarters in NoMa, the one-time industrial neighborhood north of Union Station that is being redeveloped with commercial and residential projects.

The agency leases more than three floors of space at "One Noma Station," on M Street, N.E., inside a converted warehouse surrounded by construction cranes. The EEOC corridors have a sleek, spare look, with red and white decor and glass doors.

"Employees hate it," said Martin. "There just are not a lot of amenities. The area will be up and coming, but not everyone is of the mindset of being the first ones."

Complaints are common about temperature fluctuations, tight quarters and the lack of underground parking, banks, and restaurants. Beyond that is a sense that the civil rights agency has been moved off the beaten track, particularly in comparison to the previous downtown location.

In addition to the headquarters, the new location houses the EEOC's Washington field office. EEOC officials worry that the tight security at the building � the space is also shared with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - may discourage some discrimination victims from entering the office to file a complaint.

"A field office should be in a place where it's easily accessible," said Andrew. "At One NoMa, a member of the public who wants to file a complaint can't just walk in. They have to be screened and escorted."

With the arrival of a president who once worked as a civil rights attorney, EEOC employees say they are hoping the agency will see better times.

"The new Administration brings new possibilities to the EEOC," Ishimaru told staff members in his e-mail.

"Many employees are very hopeful, but it's tempered with concern about whether they can do things for us because of the wars and the bailout," said Martin. "We do have a lot of hope that with new leadership, we can get the staffing we need."

"People who work at this agency are committed," said Inzeo. "They've been doing their jobs. There's a good bit of optimism that we'll do good and better things."

Holder Seen as a Chance To Right Racial Wrongs

With First Black Attorney General Come Expectations That Justice System Can Change

By Carrie Johnson and Krissah Thompson
� Washington Post
February 5, 2009

For decades, the face of the criminal justice system in this country has been black and male: hundreds of thousands locked behind bars, arrested in disproportionate numbers and facing execution at rates far greater than those for the general population.

This week, Eric H. Holder Jr.'s swearing-in as the nation's first black attorney general and its top law enforcement official came weighted with heavy expectation that the system could change.

Known as a prosecutor who was unflinchingly tough on crime, Holder, 58, is also a former civil rights lawyer who has mentored young black men. Many advocates view him as the best chance in decades to right what they consider unchecked racial injustice and insensitivity by federal officials.

Civil rights advocates are already outlining a long list of priorities, including changing laws that lead to disproportionate prison terms for blacks, ending racial profiling and stepping up the policing of discrimination in employment and housing.

"The most important thing is that we have a person who gets it," said Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP. "He understands that the purpose of incarceration is not just punishment and protection but it is also redemption. He understands that people shouldn't be targeted because of what they look like but because of what they do. He understands that enforcing civil rights serves the interest of law enforcement. It's not about what he looks like, it's about what he believes."

Holder will oversee civil rights enforcement, crime prevention and racial justice -- issues with a broad impact and audience -- among many competing priorities in an agency that also plays a central role in fighting terrorism and policing corporate abuse. Fixing decades of perceived injustices is a difficult task at any time but will be especially challenging for Holder now, when government budgets have tightened and scarce money is allocated to national security and defense efforts.

In public statements since his nomination, Holder has emphasized civil rights enforcement, but he has not indicated a desire to plunge headlong into broad changes to the criminal laws. Civil rights enforcement represents a fraction of the Justice Department's wide-ranging responsibilities.

As he settles in during his first days in office, Holder said his personal story will inevitably shape his view of the job. His father served in World War II and was forced to stand in a segregated railroad car, Holder said. His grandmother was not allowed to sit at the counter at Woolworth in New Jersey. His sister-in-law was on the front lines of integrating the University of Alabama.

"As someone who witnessed the civil rights movement and whose family members literally suffered through the evils of segregation, I hope I can bring a unique perspective to the department," he said. "This department has played a historic role in civil rights over the years, and I owe it to those who came before me and to the American people I serve to oversee a vigorous enforcement program that deals with the realities we confront today."

On issues of crime and punishment, Holder brings his background as a hard-nosed, law-and-order prosecutor. As a U.S. attorney in the District, he lobbied for tougher minimum sentences for drug offenders but later changed course on nonviolent criminals, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a D.C.-based group that calls for changing the sentencing system.

In his time away from the office, friends say, Holder worried about young black men caught up in the criminal justice system.

In the 1980s, he and his fellow public corruption prosecutor Reid H. Weingarten began to volunteer at the Oak Hill juvenile detention center. And as the crack epidemic ravaged the District in the mid-1980s, Holder became an early member of the local chapter of Concerned Black Men, a mentoring group founded to provide positive black male role models. From the judge's bench, he sent scores of young black men to prison, but in his chambers, he hosted children involved in the mentoring program.

At one of the group's fundraisers, Holder met his wife, prominent Washington obstetrician Sharon Malone. He still makes financial contributions to the organization, said Executive Director George L. Garrow Jr.

"We like to believe that we've helped him keep in touch with the community," Garrow said.

Holder's presence at the top of the Justice Department, along with his history, sends a powerful signal, said Larry Thompson, who succeeded Holder as the second black deputy attorney general.

"You bring your full self to the job, your experiences, your background," he said.

President Obama and Holder have vowed to restore public faith in the department, which was plagued by political hiring scandals during the years that George W. Bush was president. Last month, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine exposed hiring abuses and racial insults at the civil rights division, underscoring persistent complaints from Democrats that it had lost its way as the nation's premier protector of the rights of African Americans.

The black community's relationship with the department has long been complicated. The distrust of law enforcement organizations was increased by the FBI, which for years harassed and spied on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

At the same time, activists have taken pride in the glory days of the civil rights division, which was established in 1957. Over the next decade, the department helped protect Freedom Riders and students seeking to break color barriers at state universities.

For criminal justice activists, a pressing concern has been sentencing disparities for convicts caught with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. Possession of crack carries longer criminal penalties, and 80 percent of people prosecuted for crack offenses have been African American, according to the Sentencing Project. Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to end the sentencing disparity.

But when Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) asked Holder at his confirmation hearing to work with Congress to promote more fairness in sentencing laws, he responded with the cool of a longtime judge and prosecutor: "We have to be tough. We have to be smart. And we have to be fair. Our criminal justice system has to be fair. It has to be viewed as being fair."

The sentence disparities have combined with social and economic factors to lead to the increasing number of African Americans in prison, a figure that has grown from 100,000 in 1954 -- the year of the Supreme Court's seminal school desegregation case -- to 900,000 today, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

"When we look at the prison system, it's a much worse situation than we had seen before the rise of the modern-day civil rights movement," said Mark Mauer, executive director of the group. "If current trends continue, one of every three black males today can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. It is one in every six for Hispanic men."

Locally, four out of five D.C. prisoners are black men.

Holder seldom broaches the topic of race directly, but in a 1997 National Public Radio interview conducted soon after his appointment as the Justice Department's second in command, he shared a quote by the late Samuel Proctor, a pastor in Harlem, that he carried in his wallet.

"It says that blackness is another issue entirely apart from class in America," Holder said. "No matter how affluent, educated and mobile a black person becomes, his race defines him more particularly than anything else."

Obama Snubs Black Press

John B. Russwurm, founder, Freedom's Journal

By Joseph Curl

February 10, 2009

After the first black president completed his first prime-time press conference, the black press was red hot.

"We were window dressing," said Hazel Edney, a reporter with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, also known as the Black Press of America. "We were nothing more than window dressing."

As the media filed into the stately White House East Room on Monday night, the reporter was shocked to find herself in the front row. Alongside her were the top news agencies, Associated Press, Reuters; also up front, 86-year-old Helen Thomas, who started covering presidents 50 years ago.

Alongside the most prominent journalists in America was Tiffany Cross from Black Entertainment Television. Like Miss Edney, she didn't know why she was in first-class while all the television networks - every single one - was exiled to the steerage compartment.

"I really don't know why I'm up here," Miss Cross said with a shy smile.

While most on the front row got to pose a question to President Obama, the two reporters from the black press did not. Nor did any other black-press reporter, for that matter.

"This was like Reagan, when he'd put all the blacks up front," said another prominent but visibly peeved black-press reporter who asked to remain anonymous. "He oughta' be ashamed."

The new seating arrangement miffed a lot of reporters. In years past, the front row, usually nine or 10 seats, was peopled with the three main wires, the five big networks, Miss Thomas and, sometimes, a big newspaper, like the New York Times or USA Today.

While the two wires were up front, Bloomberg News, which travels in every tight pool alongside AP and Reuters, was stationed in the second row. Of the networks, only CBS made that row. All but one of the others - ABC, CNN and NBC were in the third (while Fox News' Major Garrett was dispatched to the fourth row, far to the right of the presidential podium).

Seated in that prime front row, though, were some newcomers. Along with reporters from NNPA and BET were Sam Stein of the archly liberal Huffington Post and Ed Schultz, star of the "Ed Schultz Radio Show," an unabashedly liberal talk-show host, who boasts 3 million listeners dubbed "Ed Heads."

Asked how he garnered the piece of prime real estate, Mr. Schultz said with a shrug: "I don't know. They told me it was a random thing."

"But it's not bad being up front," said Mr. Schultz, whose book "Straight Talk From the Heartland," is touted on his Web site as having "laid a road map for the progressive wave that's sweeping America."

Although the packed East Room held 166 seats - with more than 100 others standing around the perimeter - two of the nine front-and-center seats were empty throughout the hour-long press conference. For some reason, no reporter from el Nuevo Dia, which Wikipedia says is "a newspaper written in Spanish based in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico and distributed daily throughout Puerto Rico and some parts of the mainland United States," bothered to take their seat next to Miss Thomas.

Salem Radio, a conservative radio station that is also part of the tight pool with the big wire services, also checked in and then never took their seat.

None of it mattered, though, because Mr. Obama called reporters from a list on the podium, and reporters buzzed afterward about how he didn't seem to know a single reporter he called on - at least in the front row.

"And let me go to Jennifer Loven at AP," the president said, looking to his left, and then back a row or two before finding the AP reporter front and center, about eight feet from the podium. "Ah, there you are."

"Caren Bohan of Reuters?" he said after finishing a long economics tutorial. He looked left and right before finding the red-headed reporter - right next to Miss Loven.

"All right. Chuck Todd. Where's Chuck?" Mr. Obama said before finding the goateed reporter in the third row. "Ed Henry. Where's Ed? CNN. There he is," he said shortly after Mr. Henry stood up. "Major Garrett. Where is Major?" he said before finding the reporter back in the cheap seats.

While Mr. Obama didn't call on Mr. Schultz in the front row, he did skip giant national newspapers like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal in favor of the Huffington Post, which didn't disappoint.

"Sam Stein, Huffington Post. Where's Sam?"

"Right here."

"There. Go ahead."

"Today, Senator Patrick Leahy announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that before you turn the page, you have to read - read the page first. Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?"

The first post-partisan president paused, then answered. "My view is also that nobody's above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen."

The president ticked through all the usual suspects, calling on the three wires and all five networks before hitting The Washington Post and New York Times, both of whom sent black reporters. The only other question from outside the box was from NPR.

"Mara Liasson?" the president said as he scanned the crowd.