The Curry Report

April 7, 2009

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In This Issue

No Slam Dunk in the Classroom

Firefighters' Civil Rights Case Could Reshape Hiring Policies

Did John Hope Franklin Want $100 Trillion for Blacks?

Racial Bias Seen in Hiring of Waiters

GOP's McCain, King Seek Pardon for Boxing Champ

Piety and Ambition Drive New CNN Host

No Slam Dunk in the Classroom

By George E. Curry

NNPA Columnist

If the basketball championship games had been based on how athletes performed in the classroom instead of on the basketball court, Monday night's championship game in Detroit would have been between Duke and Villanova instead of North Carolina and Michigan State in the men's division and top-ranked Connecticut would have faced either Ohio State, Stanford or Vanderbilt instead of Louisville in the women's championship game Tuesday night in St. Louis.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, based at the University of Central Florida, listed academic rankings for both men and women basketball programs. Using the NCAA's Graduation Success Rates, Duke and Villanova were tied in the men's bracket with 89 percent, followed closely by North Carolina at 86 percent, Xavier (82 percent), Purdue (77 percent) and Pittsburgh (69 percent). Michigan State was ranked 9th, with a 60 percent rate.

In the women's competition, Connecticut, Ohio State, Stanford and Vanderbilt were all tied at 100 percent. Iowa State and Pittsburgh tied at 93 percent, followed by Arizona State with 90 percent. Louisville came in 11th, with an 80 percent success rate.

The rankings were contained in a report titled, "Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Rates and Academic Progress Rates (APR) for 2009 NCAA Division 1 Basketball Tournament Teams."

Richard Lapchick, director of the sports institute and principal author of the study, said that while there has been some overall progress in the teams that made the NCAA tournament this year compared to last year, there were some notable shortcomings.

"...The continuing significant disparity between the academic success between African-American and white men's basketball student-athletes is deeply troubling," Lapchick said in the report. "One of higher education's greatest failures is the persistent gap between African-American and white basketball student-athletes in particular and students in general. The good news is that the gaps are narrowing slightly and that the actual graduation rates of African-American basketball student-athletes are increasing."

According to the report, 58 percent (33 teams) of the men's basketball tournament graduated 70 percent or more of their White men players, while only 32 percent (20 teams) graduated 70 percent or more of the Black male players, a gap of 26 percent (down from last year's 31 percent margin). In perhaps the most telling analysis, 88 percent of the schools (50 teams), graduated at least half of their White basketball players but only 50 percent (31 teams) graduated 50 percent or more of their African-American basketball players, creating a 38 percent gap, up from last year's margin of 26 percent.

"It is important to understand the fact that African-American players graduate at a higher rate than African-American males who are not student-athletes," Lapchick observed. "The graduation rate for African-American male students as a whole is only 38 percent, versus the overall rate of 61 percent for white male students, which is a scandalous 23 percentage point gap. Too many of our predominantly white campuses are not welcoming places for students of color, whether or not they are athletes."

In a report issued in February comparing racial and gender progress in all sports, universities received a C+ for race, lower than the professional sports leagues.

"The primary problem, regarding racial hiring practices, is that whites still dominated key positions," said a racial and gender report card issued by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. "They hold between 88-97 percent of all positions in the following categories in Division I, II and III: university presidents, athletic directors, head coaches, associate athletic directors, faculty and athletics reps, and sport information directors. They hold 100 percent of the conference commissioner positions in Division I excluding Historically Black Colleges and Universities."

Looking that the numbers more closely, universities did the best job hiring Black head coaches in basketball, where they were given a grade of A. In football, by contrast, universities received an F. Of the 120-top division football coaches, only three were Black during the 2007 season, a figure that rose to seven by the end of the 2008 season.

In other key positions, Blacks made up only 7.2 percent of the athletic directors in Division I, 3.8 percent in Division II and 1.8 percent in Division III.

Of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, formerly known as Division 1A, 111 (92.5 percent) were headed by White presidents. Three - Middle Tennessee State, Ohio University and Washington State University - were headed by Blacks.
Sports Information Directors were described as "one of the whitest positions in all of sports when HBCUs are excluded," the report said. "It is 95.0 percent, 93.4 and 95.0 percent white in Division I, II and III respectively. This is very important because the SID is usually the key decision maker in what and who is publicized among coaches and student-athletes."

As we relax in the afterglow of March Madness, let's not forget the racial madness that still permeates the highest level of college sports.

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.

Firefighters' Civil Rights Case Could Reshape Hiring Policies

By David G. Savage
(c) Los Angeles Times
April 6, 2009

WASHINGTON - Frank Ricci -- a firefighter in New Haven, Conn. -- spent months listening to study tapes as he drove to work and in the evenings, preparing for a promotional test. It was a once-a-decade chance to move up to a command rank in the fire department.

Ricci earned a top score but no promotion.

The city had coded the test takers by race, and of the top 15 scorers, 14 were white and one was Latino. Since there were only 15 vacancies, it looked as though no blacks would be promoted.

After a racially charged debate that stretched over four hearings, the city's civil service board rejected the test scores five years ago and promoted no one.

"To have the city throw it out because you're white or because you're not African American is insulting," Ricci said when he and 19 other firefighters sued the city for racial discrimination.

Their case, scheduled to be argued this month, is the first to come before the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that broadly raises the issue of race in the workplace. The outcome could reshape hiring and promotion policies for millions of the nation's public employees -- and possibly for private employers as well.

Roberts, leading a five-justice majority, has made clear that he believes it is time to forbid the use of race as a factor in the government's decisions.

The Obama administration, taking its first stand on race and civil rights, sided with the city officials and said they were justified in dropping the test if it had "gross exclusionary effects on minorities." While blacks make up about 31% of New Haven's 221 firefighters, 15% are officers -- eight of the department's 42 lieutenants and one of its 18 captains.

At issue in the New Haven case is whether an employer can weigh the racial effect of a hiring or promotional standard.

Lawyers for the firefighters say the city violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it threw out the test scores. They say the law forbids employers from "discriminating against one group of individuals to benefit another group on account of race." The white firefighters "ask nothing more than the basic right to be judged by who they are and what they have accomplished, not by the color of their skin," the lawyers say.

But the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said the claim ignored the history of discrimination that excluded blacks from fire and police departments. In many cities, including New Haven, the "fire department was the preserve of white males," said John Payton, who is also counsel for the defense fund. "African Americans were virtually excluded." That's why cities across the country have fought discrimination lawsuits involving their fire departments, he said.

Many of the cases have stretched over decades. In the 1970s, civil rights lawyers sued many cities because minorities were excluded for city jobs. In response, cities often signed consent decrees promising to hire and promote more blacks. However, in the decades since, cities have fought long-running lawsuits from whites who say they were victims of reverse discrimination.

Last month, Chicago paid a $6-million settlement to 75 white firefighters who said they lost promotions when test scores were scrapped in 1986.

"This was very similar to what is before the court in the Connecticut case," said Linda Friedman, a Chicago lawyer for the firefighters there. "The city of Chicago saw itself in a predicament. They thought they could be sued by blacks if they used the exam. And they were sued [by whites] when they decided against using the exam scores."

These cases highlight a conflict in federal civil rights law.

The Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 say employers may not discriminate against people because of their race. However, employers also have been told they may not use hiring or promotional standards -- including tests -- that have a "disparate impact" on minorities.

The court adopted this rule in a 1971 case. Congress added it to federal law in 1991. The new provision said employers may not use a job standard that has a "disparate impact on the basis of race" unless it is "required by business necessity." For example, it is not certain that the knowledge tested by the firefighter's exam was required to be a lieutenant in the fire department.

In New Haven, the city's lawyers cited this "disparate impact" rule as their reason for scrapping the test scores in 2004.

"I understand their disappointment," Victor Bolden, the city's corporation counsel, said in an interview, referring to the white firefighters. "But this test had an adverse impact [on minorities]. The city did the right thing. It made a measured response in a difficult circumstance. Someone was going to be disappointed, and we could be sued either way."

Payton emphasized that New Haven had not rejected the white firefighters because of their race, but rather rejected the use of the written exam as the sole determinant of who would be promoted.

"New Haven ought to be able to go back to the drawing board," he said, to devise a fairer promotion system.

New Haven is a racially mixed city of 124,000. About 44% of its residents are white, 37% black and 21% Latino.

The Obama administration told the court that New Haven officials were justified in scrapping the test results if they had "a reasonable belief" they could be sued by blacks for discrimination.

Lawyers for the white firefighters insist that "racial politics" and "cronyism" were behind the city's decision. They said Boise Kimber, an outspoken black minister, was a key political ally of Mayor John DeStefano Jr., and that he pressured the city civil service board into rejecting the test results.

"You have a responsibility of making this fire department look like New Haven," Kimber told the board in one heated session. "And it ain't looking like New Haven."

Citing the "voluminous record in this case," the Obama administration said the court should send the case back to a judge in Connecticut to consider whether the white firefighters were victims of racial politics.

Yale law professor Drew Days, a former chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said he was surprised the justices agreed to hear the case of Ricci vs. DeStefano. Now that they have, he added, a ruling for Ricci "could have very far-reaching consequences because it may well apply to all employers."

Did John Hope Franklin Want $100 Trillion for Blacks?

By Bakari Kitwana

April 6, 2009

Dr. John Hope Franklin, the wildly accomplished historian who documented Blacks' place in the great American story, firmly believed in reparations -- the idea that the descendants of slaves in the United States should be compensated for the centuries of free labor that enriched slaveowners and their descendants and the American empire. It is a fact overlooked by the recent flurry of mainstream media coverage commemorating his life work. (He died at the age of 94 late last month.) But it is no small detail.

Consider his response in 2007 to state legislators in North Carolina and Virginia who balked at apologies for slavery introduced by their peers. For him a mere verbal apology wasn't enough.

"People are running around apologizing for slavery," he said. "What about that awful period since slavery -- Reconstruction, Jim Crow and all the rest? And what about the enormous wealth that was built up by black labor? I think that's little to pay for the gazillions that black people built up -- the wealth of this country -- with their labor, and now you're going to say I'm sorry I beat the hell out of you for all these years? That's not enough."

When Dr. Franklin spoke of history, he did so with the definitive authority of an expert who spent over half a century culling through the details. His accomplishments are legendary: distinguished Duke University professor who taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard University (where he earned his doctorate in 1941); author of 20 books; first African American to chair a history dept at a predominately white university; over 3.5 million copies of his book From Slavery to Freedom have been printed since it's 1947 publication.

It is very easy now in our age of political correctness to courteously applaud the accomplishments of a barrier breaking African American in the field of U.S. History, which he said he wrote without "the embellishment of emotional display." But an entirely different pill to swallow is the conclusion he gleaned from his analysis: reparations are essential to acknowledging the country's wrongs.

"There are all kinds of ways you could do it," Franklin said in a video interview at Duke University, in which he insisted he wasn't asking for reparations personally -- even though he was entitled. "What about scholarships? What about descent places for people to live? Out of the fortunes that were made, you could build a mansion for the descendant of every former slave."

Others have argued that reparations should be paid directly by the U.S. government, which Harpers magazine (November 2000) estimated at $100 trillion dollars for 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865 with compounded interest of 6 percent. Still others have argued that payments should come from corporations who benefited as well as former colonial governments.

The idea of reparations for Blacks has for years been met in the American mainstream with at best contempt and at worst ridicule. But for John Hope Franklin the essential truth of American history was found not just in the large sweeping narrative, but also in the subtleties of the racial divide lived everyday.

His careers as a historian and as an activist (he was a researcher for Thurgood Marshall for the Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education case and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma) are well documented. Less known are his day-to-day confrontations with the legacy of white supremacy, subtleties he often related in personal anecdotes:

As a 6 year-old boy, his father's business in Tulsa was destroyed (luckily his father survived) during the infamous 1921 race riot. As one of the first Black boy scouts in 1927, he was severely reprimanded midway through helping a blind white woman cross the street upon her discovery he was black. In 1995, while in DC to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest award for a civilian, he hosted a party for friends at the Cosmos Club where he was a member and was asked by a white woman to get her coat, even though uniform attendants were present.

Personal insults like these only scratch the surface of the economic and psychological setbacks he suffered, like countless other African Americans, at the hands of white supremacy ingrained in American culture. Insults like these were a reminder of the big picture reasons why descendant of enslaved Africans lagged behind in the present. For Dr. Franklin, this was a direct result of American slavery.

"They ought to develop some kind of modus operandi that they can do something else -- something to absolve themselves of three centuries of guilt from which they are the direct beneficiaries," he said in a 2007 interview. "How large is the black population now living in abject poverty in this country? How large is the population of blacks who have poor health? Sometimes they inherited the poor health right from their forebears who were beaten and treated like they were animals all over this country."

It is true, as opponents of reparations argue, that America's troublesome history of racial inequity was born in the past. But it is equally apparent, as John Hope Franklin insisted, that our future is defined by the ways we address its legacy in the present.

If we really seek to commemorate him, it seems to me that the best we can do is to not just pay lip service to the man. Instead we should honor him by paying homage in the form of meaningful national policy that considers the conclusion of his life work.

Bakari Kitwana is visiting scholar at Columbia College's Center for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media and co-author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2009). He also writes for NewsOne.com.

Racial Bias Seen in Hiring of Waiters

Waiters

By Jennifer Lee
� New York Times
March 31, 2009

Expensive restaurants in New York discriminate based on race when hiring waiters, a new study has concluded. The study was based on experiments in which pairs of applicants with similar r�sum�s were sent to ask about jobs. The pairs were matched for gender and appearance, said Marc Bendick Jr., the economist who conducted the study. The only difference was race, he said.

White job applicants were more likely to receive followup interviews at the restaurants, be offered jobs, and given information about jobs, and their work histories were less likely to be investigated in detail, he said Tuesday. He spoke at a news conference releasing the report in a Manhattan restaurant.

"There really should not be a lot of difference in how the two of them are treated," Mr. Bendick said. He was hired by advocacy groups for restaurant workers as part of a larger report called "The Great Service Divide: Occupational Segregation and Equality in the New York City Restaurant Industry." He has made a career of studying discrimination, ranging from racism in the advertising industry to sexism in firefighting.

Mr. Bendick said that in industries, such experiments typically found discrimination 20 to 25 percent of the time. In New York restaurants, it was found 31 percent of the time.

"That tells us that is a particularly serious situation of discrimination," he said. "The rate of discrimination is worse for jobs that are really worth having. You don't get a lot of discrimination for hamburger-flipping jobs at McDonalds."

The jobs at expensive restaurants in New York can be particularly lucrative. "These are the jobs that you can make $55,000 to $100,000 a year," Mr. Bendick said.

Andrew Rigie, director of operations for the greater New York chapter of the New York State Restaurants Association, who was at the news conference at which the report was released, said the report brought up important points.

"Anything that is in the study, we are able to better educate our members," he said. "The restaurant industry in New York City really provides upward mobility for people of all races, genders and backgrounds." His organization, a trade association, did not participate in the study but has taken an interest in the results.

For the experiment, Mr. Bendick hired 37 people to act as white, black, Asian-American and Latino job applicants. Black candidates included African Americans, African immigrants and those with Caribbean backgrounds.

The pairs were matched for age, appearance and gender, trained to have similar mannerisms and answer questions in similar ways. Their arrival at restaurants offering jobs was arranged so that the average time between the two candidates was 37 minutes. Applicants were sent to 181 restaurants, resulting in 138 complete tests between January 2006 and June 2007.

"The important thing is that we repeat the experiment dozens of times so that we can be pretty sure when a pattern emerges that it really is differences in employer behaviors and it not a random effect," he said.

According to the test results:
�       * Nonwhite job applicants were 54.5 percent as likely as white applicants to get a job offer, and were less likely than white testers to receive a job interview in the first place.
�        * The work experience of white job applicants was less likely to be subject to scrutiny.
�        * Accents made a difference - with white candidates. White applicants with slight European accents were 23.1 percent more likely to be hired than white testers with no accent. However, accents in nonwhite applicants made no difference.

The report was commissioned by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York and The New York City Restaurant Industry Coalition, two groups behind a 2005 study of restaurant workplace practices, "Behind the Kitchen Door: Pervasive Inequality in New York's Thriving Restaurant Industry"

"That's when we started seeing a lot of discrimination between front of the house, the serving positions, and back of the house, the kitchen position," said Rekha Eanni-Rodriguez, director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center.

She said Monday that workers had long approached them with stories of discrimination in the front of the house, where they were never able to get promotions beyond being a busboy or a runner. The groups realized that "We need more than worker stories. We need to test it out ourselves."

The groups approached Mr. Bendick, a partner in a consulting firm, because of his previous work. His work has attracted attention recently with a report on discrimination in the advertising industry, Research Perspectives on Race and Employment in the Advertising Industry [pdf], and a report on sexual discrimination in firefighting, "Enhancing Women's Inclusion in Firefighting" [pdf]. "He's a big name in testing, one of the biggest," Ms. Eanni-Rodriguez said.

Mr. Bendick said he had seen the 2005 study, "where they did quite a credible job."

"There are a lot of allegations, a lot of suspicions around, that there was a lot of discrimination against people of color in the restaurant industry," Mr. Bendick said. "The advantage of this testing and this testing methodology is that it looks at that allegation very directly."

The study, which was supported by foundation grants, cost over $150,000 and was well worth the investment, Ms. Eanni-Rodriguez said. "When we are talking about an issue as complex and controversial as race and discrimination, you want to cover all your bases."

"It's not just a matter of a few bad apples. We do believe it's an industrywide trend," said Ms. Eanni-Rodriguez, who said she it prompts restaurants to scrutinize themselves.

Among the policy proposals the report offered was legislation requiring that restaurants adopt uniform promotion policies and make job information for highly-paid positions available. "We hope that absolute change comes out of it, not just awareness," she said.

GOP's McCain, King Seek Pardon for Boxing Champ

By William Douglas

� McClatchy Newspapers

April 1, 2009

WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain and Rep. Peter King are hoping that they have a fighting chance of persuading the nation's first African-American president to pardon posthumously the world's first African-American heavyweight boxing champion.

McCain, R-Ariz., and King, R-N.Y., unveiled a congressional resolution Wednesday calling on President Barack Obama to pardon Jack Johnson, who won the heavyweight title a century before Obama took the oath of office.

Johnson's 1908-1915 reign atop the boxing world was flamboyant and controversial. He was reviled by many whites at the time for his boxing prowess, his wealth, and for openly courting and marrying white women.

Displeasure with Johnson spawned a search for a "great white hope," a white challenger who could knock him to the canvass and take his title. But the law delivered the biggest blow to Johnson in 1913 when he was convicted under the Mann Act for having a consensual relationship with a white woman across state lines.

McCain, King, and historians believe that Johnson's conviction was racially motivated. Johnson fled the United States to France before he was sentenced. He finally lost his heavyweight title to a white fighter - Jess Willard - in Havana in 1915.

"Not that I'm a great liberal, but heavyweight champions used to be the greatest athletes and Jack Johnson was a champion, the first African-American champion," said King, a recreational boxer and conservative lawmaker from Long Island. "Jack Johnson was hounded out of the championship and out of boxing. He didn't get his due and the African-American community didn't get their due. This would help clear that cloud."

Johnson died in a car crash in North Carolina in 1946. His story has been chronicled in stage and film productions of "The Great White Hope," and in "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a PBS documentary by Ken Burns.

"A pardon is much needed - it's fairly clear that Jack Johnson was framed, railroaded," said Christopher Rivers, a French professor at Mount Holyoke College and boxing enthusiast who translated into English a memoir Johnson wrote in French during his exile years. "He was unapologetic, sassy, always with a smile on his face. White Americans were not ready to see a black man beat up white men and get paid lots of money for it."

This is the latest attempt at a Johnson pardon for McCain and King. A similar resolution didn't make it through both houses of Congress in 2004. The House of Representatives approved a resolution last year urging then-President George W. Bush to pardon Johnson, who like Bush, grew up in Texas. The Senate failed to approve a similar measure and Bush didn't pardon Johnson.

King feels that, given the historic nature of Obama's presidency, that the time is now right for Johnson.

"He (Obama) obviously has some appreciation of African-American history," King said. "Senator McCain obviously has a relationship, a good one, with the president. And this is not an ideological issue - it's a human issue."

Posthumous presidential pardons are rare, but they happen. In 1999, Bill Clinton pardoned Lt. Henry O. Flipper, the Army's first African-American to graduate from West Point. He was forced out of the military in 1882 after white officers accused him of embezzling commissary funds.

Last year, Bush pardoned Charles Winters, who was convicted of violating the Neutrality Act in 1948 by helping transfer two B-17 aircraft to Israel.

Chances for the McCain-King resolution passing and Obama granting a pardon may also be enhanced by Washington's eagerness of late to recognize and address historic wrongs. In 2007, Bush awarded the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American military aviators, the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Led by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., Republican and Democratic women in the Senate last month introduced a bill calling for the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) to receive the Congressional Gold Medal. The WASP were female aviators who helped in the World War II effort but were denied military status and benefits.

"I assume Johnson's chances are excellent - he should be someone who's appealing to President Obama," Rivers said.

Piety and Ambition Drive New CNN Host

Roland Martin Fills In On 'No Bias, No Bull'

By Howard Kurtz
� Washington Post
April 6, 2009

Ten minutes before his debut as a CNN host last Monday, Roland Martin called his pastor back in Chicago. They proceeded to pray.

His divine hope, says Martin, who has repeated the ritual each evening, is "that God uses me as an instrument for his will to provide insight to those who are listening."

As Martin speaks, in great cascades of words that flow by like a rushing river, it is clear this is no garden-variety pundit. He is African American, the first to host a prime-time cable news program since Alan Keyes's brief run on MSNBC seven years ago. He is ubiquitous, holding forth in venues as varied as morning radio, a syndicated column, an Essence magazine blog and a forthcoming book. And he is a take-charge family man, insisting that four nieces who he felt had a poor home environment move in with him and his wife, an ordained minister.

Martin is filling in for Campbell Brown, whose second child is due this week, and after her two-month leave he will anchor a CNN nighttime program on the weekend. If the past is any guide, his ambitions are larger than that. When a CNN recruiter first asked him to appear on a program in 2002, Martin recalls responding: "You might think this is an arrogant statement, but you book me one time, trust me, you're going to book me again."

CNN President Jon Klein says Martin "had a quality about him that made you stop and listen to what he had to say. I think it's because he's a professional journalist wrapped in a bundle of energy. . . . He lets you know how much he cares."

Still, the 40-year-old Houston native might seem an odd choice to host Brown's "No Bias, No Bull." During the campaign, CNN used him as a liberal commentator who backed Barack Obama, regularly pairing him with a conservative. But Martin balks at being pigeonholed.

"When you create these boxes, frankly, people only look at the boxes," he says. "We have to open up our boxes and realize there are actually people out there who refuse to be driven by ideology or party labels."

Martin says he isn't a party-line liberal. He is opposed to abortion and backs the death penalty. He criticized the Obama administration for opposing school vouchers for poor students. He cast his first presidential vote for George H.W. Bush.

Klein says Martin's left-leaning stance is not a problem because "now we're asking him not to express his point of view but to host interesting conversations among a range of people."

The son of an Amtrak employee and an insurance adjuster, Martin graduated from Texas A&M University, later working as a reporter and editor for two black newspapers in Texas and for Savoy magazine. In 2004 he became executive editor of the Chicago Defender, a struggling black weekly. Melody Spann-Cooper, chairman of Midway Broadcasting, gave him a morning show on Chicago's WVON.

"He has one of those personalities that is in your face," she says. "Roland is not afraid to buck the system. He gives it to you straight, no chaser."

Martin took on Chicago's Democratic machine over patronage and what he considered a paucity of contracts for minorities. "A lot of people did not take to Roland right away," Spann-Cooper says.

One who still hasn't taken to Martin, now a commentator on Tom Joyner's radio show, is Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg. They clashed bitterly on Martin's old radio show.

"I see him as a man who can't think, can't talk, and here he is doing both on television," Steinberg says. "I find it mystifying that CNN would take this local laughingstock and inflict him on the rest of the nation."

Martin, who says he "smacked him around" on the radio over a controversial column, calls Steinberg "a media wimp . . . a know-it-all with a penchant for being snotty."

The Rev. James Meeks, pastor of Chicago's Salem Baptist Church, who prayed with Martin by phone last week, says he is dedicated to evangelical Christianity. "As self-confident as he is, he relies on a source from within -- God," Meeks says. "He's a person who's unashamed of his belief." A gadget freak who owns three iPods and two BlackBerrys, Martin often sends text messages assuring the reverend he is on his way to church.

That same intensity was on display last summer when he persuaded his sister to send her daughters -- 10, 9, and 5-year-old twins -- to his Chicago condominium. Martin says the older girls were functionally illiterate. "I frankly felt my sister and her husband were not doing a good job raising their kids," Martin says. He says his sister talks to the children every night and takes them back when school is out.

After drawing praise -- and a Peabody Award last week -- for its campaign coverage, CNN has lagged in the evenings. Last month, for the first time, MSNBC edged out CNN in prime time. Fox News, meanwhile, drew more viewers than both networks combined.

Klein says CNN had its best first quarter since 2003, up 17 percent since the same period last year. CNN is a 24-hour network, he says, and prime time "is such a small sliver of our overall business."

Brown's program was up 5 percent last month over her debut the previous March, according to Nielsen ratings. For the first quarter, however, her 1.07 million viewers put her behind her more opinionated rivals: Fox's Bill O'Reilly (3.35 million), MSNBC's Keith Olbermann (1.36 million) and Nancy Grace of Headline News (1.17 million). So Martin is taking over a fourth-place program.

He can overwhelm at times with his level of bombast, but has toned it down on "No Bias." Martin roamed the set last week, rarely sitting down, taking calls from viewers and challenging his guests. He moderated a debate over Notre Dame protests against a planned appearance by Obama based on the president's support for abortion rights -- but never divulged his own opinion.

Martin first met Obama at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner in 2003, and they have stayed in touch. He was part of a group of liberal commentators granted an audience with the president-elect days before the inauguration. In television, says Martin, "you cannot have the same people talking to folks in a changed America."