Curry Media Logo
The Curry Report
June 2, 2009
 
In This Issue
Another 'Blame a Black Man' Hoax
Sotomayor's Focus on Race May Be a Hurdle
A Compelling Biography is No Guarantee of a Smooth Confirmation
Ideology plays key role in high court picks
Up and Out of New York's Projects
Cheney Often Wrong, Seldom Doubted
On Diverse Force, Blacks Still Face Special Peril
Texas Limits '10%' Admissions
Ronald T. Takaki dies at 70
Another 'Blame a Black Man' Hoax
Curry Headshot

By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist
   

Move over Charles Stuart and Susan Smith. Bonnie Sweeten of suburban Philadelphia has now qualified to be inducted into the Hall of Shame that bestows special recognition upon Whites who have committed crimes and then falsely blamed a Black man.

Last week, Sweeten and her 9-year-old daughter, Julia, were the subject of a national missing persons search. The drama began when Sweeten made a frantic call to 9-1-1 at 1:45 p.m. on Tuesday saying after a fender-bender accident involving her GMC Yukon Denali and a Cadillac; Black men in the other car forced her and little Julia into the trunk of their Cadillac and sped off. She said the abduction took place on a street in Upper Southhampton Township in Bucks County.

Aided by the FBI, police in the region conducted a massive manhunt and issued an Amber Alert for Julia Rakoczy, Sweeten's daughter from a previous marriage. But the Big Lie began to unravel piece-by-piece. First, Sweeten's Yukon was not found near the intersection where she claimed the abduction took place. Instead, it was recovered approximately 12 hours later at 15th and Chestnut streets in downtown Philadelphia.

A parking ticket had been placed on the windshield of the SUV at 2:20 p.m. Tuesday, about a half-hour after Sweeten placed the frantic call to 9-1-1. Investigators doubted Black men or anyone else could have made the 25-mile trip from Upper Southampton in the middle of the day within 30 minutes.

Investigators also discovered a videotape of Sweeten and her daughter passing through a security screening device at the Philadelphia International Airport. Retracing Sweeten's steps, authorities learned that she had purchased two one-way tickets to Orlando, Fla. After withdrawing $12,000 from various accounts in days leading up to her departure, she borrowed a co-worker's license - purportedly in order to deal with a pension matter - and used the license to buy the tickets to Florida.

Sweeten and her daughter were traced to Disneyworld and were apprehended as they were returning to the Grand Floridian resort. Attorney Debbie Calitz, Sweeten's former employer, told the Philadelphia Daily News that Sweeten "stole money from my law practice," which may account for her decision to flee. After being escorted back to Philadelphia, Sweeten was charged with identity theft and making a false police report.

When I first heard of the hoax, I thought back to a story Lee Daniels, a former reporter for the New York Times, wrote for me in February 1995 when I was editor of Emerge magazine. The headline was, "The American Way: Blame a Black Man." Daniels wrote, "Susan Smith knew the powerful grip the image of the dangerous Black man has on White Americans' psyche. And who can doubt it? In her descent into pathological desperation, that knowledge became for her, as it had for Charles Stuart, the crucial element in calculating that she could commit the gruesome crime and get away with it."

Smith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for murdering her two sons, Michael, 3, and Alexander, four months old, in Union, S.C. She told police in 1994 that an armed Black man had hijacked her car at a stoplight.  She said after driving around for a while, she was forced to get out of the car, leaving her kids behind. For nine days, she stood by her story, making tearful televised appeals for the return of her children. After being confronted with several holes in the story, she confessed to driving her 1990 Mazda Protege to a lake, putting the car in drive, and hopping out after releasing the hand brake. She watched as the car rolled into the lake and sank with her two sons strapped into back seats.

On October 23, 1989, Charles Stuart, the manager of an upscale fur store in Boston, also commited a horrendous crime. He shot his pregnant wife and himself, apparently as part of an insurance scheme. After going to childbirth classes at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Stuart said a Black gunman forced his way into their car at a stoplight and shot him in the stomach and his wife, Carol, in the head. Both the wife and baby died. The break in the case came when Stuart's brother, Matthew, went to police and admitted that he had gone to the murder scene, by prearrangement with his brother, to remove his sister-in-law's jewlery, purse and the gun. The next day, Charles Stuart committed suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Boston Harbor. Matthew Stuart was sentenced to three to five years in prison for concealing evidence in the case.

During last year's presidential campaign, Ashley Todd, a campaign worker for John McCain, claimed that she was robbed at knifepoint on October 22 by a "six-foot four African American" at an ATM in Pittsburgh. She said the alleged robber saw a McCain sticker on her car and became enraged, cutting a backward "B' (for Barack) into her cheek. She later admitted lying. Although charged with making a false police report, Todd was enrolled in a first-time offender's program and can have her record expunged upon successful completion of probation.

Whether it was Bonnie Sweeten in Philadelphia, Susan Smith, Charles Stuart, Asheley Todd or Jennifer Wilbanks (the "Runaway Bride") - who claimed a Latino man and a White woman abducted and sexually assaulted her - sick Whites are not so sick that they fail to realize that they can play into America's stereotype of Black males as criminals. That sterotype was present before and it persists even as an African-American male sits in the White House.

 

 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.  

 

READ MORE CURRY COLUMNS 

Sotomayor's Focus on Race May Be a Hurdle 
 
Sotomayor Speaking


 

By David D. Kirkpatrick
� New York Times
May 30, 2009

WASHINGTON - The selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court has opened a new battle in the fight over affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for patterns of inequality, with each side invoking the election of the first black president in support of its cause. 
READ MORE
 

 

 
 

A Compelling Biography is No Guarantee of a Smooth Confirmation
Sotomayor headshot


By Michael A. Fletcher
� Washington Post
May 30, 2009

 

For his first Supreme Court pick, the president chose a pioneering minority in the hope that a compelling story of overcoming poverty to graduate from Yale Law School and become a federal appeals court judge would preempt a bitter ideological fight.

The president was George H.W. Bush and the nominee was Clarence Thomas, and if there is a lesson for President Obama in naming Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, it is that compelling personal stories go only so far in guaranteeing a smooth confirmation process.

 

 



 

Ideology plays key role in high court picks 
Supreme Court 
 

By George Curry

Philadelphia Inquirer

BEYOND THE SPIN

May 31,2009 

Before Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's choice to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, could get outside the White House gate after the announcement of her nomination, conservatives were already on the attack.

READ MORE

 

Up and Out of New York's Projects

 

 Bronxdale Houses
 

 By Lizett Alvarez and Michael Wilson
� New York Times
May 31, 2009
 

WHEN Sonia Sotomayor first set foot in the Bronxdale Houses along Bruckner Boulevard in 1957, they encapsulated New York's promise. The towers beckoned to the working class as a coveted antidote to some of the city's unlivable residential spaces and, later on, its unfathomable rents. These were not the projects of idle, stinky elevators, of gang-controlled stairwells where drug deals go down. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when most of the city's public housing was built, a sense of pride and community permeated well-kept corridors, apartments and grounds. Far from dangerous, the projects were viewed as nurturing.

There are more than 400,000 residents in the New York City Housing Authority's 2,611 buildings at any given time. Judge Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee for the United States Supreme Court, is just one of more than 100 marquee names on a city list of alumni.

Many are athletes or entertainers. Jay-Z, the rapper, grew up in the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn. Wesley Snipes, the actor, in the Monroe Houses in the Bronx. Marc Anthony, the salsa singer, in the Metro North Houses in East Harlem. Mike Tyson and Hector Camacho, the boxers, and a deep bench of basketball players all came up through the projects. READ MORE


 
Cheney Often Wrong, Seldom Doubted 

 Dick Cheney


 

Giving ex-VP a free ride in torture debate

 

Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR)

5/29/09

"Dick Cheney seems to be everywhere," declared ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl (World News, 5/13/09), calling the formerly reclusive former vice president "the most visible Republican in the country these days."

Cheney has been hard to miss. Since leaving office in January, in addition to broad coverage of his May 21 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, in recent weeks he has appeared on CBS's Face the Nation (5/10/09), Fox's Your World With Neil Cavuto (5/12/09), Fox's Hannity (4/20/09, 4/21/09) and CNN's State of the Union (3/15/09). Moreover, Cheney's public profile has been amplified by heavy coverage in other media, which have widely quoted and run video clips of the CBS, Fox and CNN interviews.

"If I don't speak out," Cheney told Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer, "then the critics have free run, and there isn't anybody there on the other side to tell the truth." Among Cheney's "truths" are that torture and abusive treatment of detainees, what he calls "enhanced interrogation," have yielded information that stopped attacks on the U.S., and that in scuttling such Bush-era policies, President Barack Obama has put the U.S. in danger.

Cheney's media tour raises some troubling questions, including why, considering his history of false and misleading statements, journalists are still clamoring for his opinions.

READ MORE 
 
 
On Diverse Force, Blacks Still Face Special Peril
 
Police Shield NYC


  

By Michael Powell

� New York Times

May 30, 2009

 

Two black police officers stand outside the 70th Precinct station in Brooklyn and consider the disastrous turn of events the night before: an off-duty black officer dead in a Harlem street, felled by the bullets of a white officer who mistook him for a threat.

 
 READ MORE

Texas Limits '10%' Admissions


Texas map

 

Inside Higher Education

June 1, 2009

 

The "10 percent" plan in Texas has been one of the most successful experiments ever tried to get more minority students into top public universities with race-neutral criteria. It spawned similar (if less ambitious) programs in California and Florida and prompted numerous debates about equity in higher education admissions. At the behest of the University of Texas at Austin and suburban politicians, and following several years of debate, the Texas Legislature on Saturday agreed to a plan that will limit the use of the system so that Austin is required to fill only 75 percent of its freshman slots for Texans under the program.

READ MORE 



Ronald T. Takaki dies at 70
Ronald Takaki 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pioneer in the field of ethnic studies

 

By Elaine Woo
(c) Los Angeles Times
May 29, 2009

Ronald T. Takaki, a prolific and controversial scholar who helped pioneer the field of ethnic studies and wrote animated histories about blacks, Asians, Latinos and other marginalized Americans during four decades on the UC Berkeley faculty, has died. He was 70.

Takaki killed himself at his Berkeley home Tuesday, his son Troy said.

The scholar had struggled for nearly 20 years with multiple sclerosis, a potentially debilitating neurological disease for which there is no cure. "He couldn't deal with it anymore," Troy Takaki said Thursday.

 

READ MORE
Speaking Engagements
Microphone
 
June 2, 2009
Kaiser Family Foundation
Washington, D.C. 
 
June 5, 2009
Urban Financial Services Coalition
Detroit, Mich.
 
June 11, 2009
 Black AIDS Institute Media Roundtable
Washington, D.C.
 
June 21, 2009
Old Storm Branch Baptist Church
North Augusta, S.C.
 
June 23, 2009
Atlanta Chapter
Knoxville College
Alumni Association
Atlanta, Ga.
 
June 25, 2009
The PowerNetworking Conference
Atlanta, Ga.
 
June 26,2009
National Newspaper Publishers Association
Minneapolis, Minn.
 
June 28-30, 2009
Raindbow PUSH
Convention
Chicago, Ill.
 
July 18-21, 2009
National Speakers Association Convention
Phoenix, Ariz.
 
August 2-5, 2009
National Black Nurses Association
Toronto, Canada
 
August 6-9, 2009
National Association of Black Journalists
Tampa, Fla.
 
August 30-September 3, 2009
White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Washington, D.C.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Book George Curry for a Speech 
 
Podium
Let Curry Spice Up Your Next Event 
Quick Links
 
Join Our Mailing List!
"Keeping it Real with Rev. Al Sharpton"
Al Sharpton Headshot
Listen to George Curry every Tuesday 2-3 P.M., EST, on Sharpton's Radio Program 

 
"The Bev Smith Show"
Bev Smith
 
.

Listen to George Curry on "The Bev Smith Show" every Friday, beginning at 7:12 p.m., EST
 
 

 
Books by George E. Curry 
 
Emerge
 
The Best of Emerge Magazine
Edited by
George E. Curry
 
"This whopper of an anthology perfectly captures black life and culture...This retrospective volume is journalism at its best: probing, controversial and serious...Although Emerge was devoted unequivocally to African-Americans, Curry's vision and editorship of this book will instruct, provoke and sometimes entertain or inspire any reader."
- Publishers Weekly

AAction
 
 
 The Affirmative Action Debate
Edited by George E. Curry

"... Collects the leading voices on all sides of this crucial dialogue...the one book you need to understand and discuss the nation's sharpest political divide."
 


 
Gaither
 
 
 Jake Gaither: America's Most Famous Black Coach
By George E. Curry

"Curry has some telling points to make on the unlooked for effects of court-ordered desegregation."
- The New York Times
 
"... an excellent example of sports writing."
- Library Journal