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1991 news archive:

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PEACH BUZZ - THE TALK AROUND ATLANTA - WTBS special draws noted blacks
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - Sunday, January 27, 1991
Author: AREY, NORMAN WOODHAM, MARTHA, Norman Arey and Martha Woodham: STAFF
Former New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, NAACP head Benjamin Hooks, actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, Harvard Law Review President Barack Obama and Atlanta Mayor Maynard H. Jackson will be among the political leaders and celebrities WTBS will host Monday when it tapes “Summit for the ‘90s,” a look at issues affecting the black community, which will air Feb. 23.

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Talk won’t end troubles, black summit cautions
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - Tuesday, January 29, 1991
Author: YANDEL, GERRY, Gerry Yandel Staff writer: STAFF
After a two-hour discussion about the problems black Americans face, a handful of well-known black activists concluded Monday that the time for talking has passed.

“Each of us has to get involved,” said Susan Taylor, editor of Essence magazine and co-moderator - with journalist Tony Brown - of a 10-member panel. The program, “Summit for the ‘90s,” is a round-table discussion of black issues scheduled to air at 10:20 p.m. Feb. 23 on WTBS/Channel 17 in celebration of Black History Month.

Other panelists were the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, SCLC president; NAACP Executive Director Benjamin L. Hooks; Alonzo Crim, former Atlanta school superintendent; former U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm; New York City Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown; Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama ; Outreach Inc. President Sandra McDonald; and Lorraine Hale, director of Hale House, a Manhattan shelter for AIDS babies.

Here are some highlights:

Black-on-black crime: “When do we accept the concept that we have to take responsibility for our lives?” Mr. Hooks said. “When some black kid gets killed, we don’t say white folks made him do it. . . . We can’t say white folks are making us commit genocide.”

Drug abuse: “The fact is, there is no war on drugs,” Lee Brown said. Tony Bro wn disagreed. “I think there is a war on drugs. I think there’s a war on young black people who sell drugs. There is no war on white, middle-class Americans who use drugs.’’

Values: “I think America has abandoned the strong woman of spirituality and is shacking up with the harlot of materialism,” the Rev. Lowery said.

Role models: “The role of black leadership in this country is to instill values and leadership, not give laconic discussions,” Ms. Chisholm said.

Self-respect: “If every American knew as much about African-American history as they could, there wouldn’t be hate. There would be respect,” Ms. McDonald said. Dr. Hale added: “We talk about what we should and could do, but we won’t do any of those things unless we like each other

DEGREES OF HATRED - CAN WE END RACIAL HOSTILITY ON AMERICA’S CAMPUSES?
Washington Post - Sunday, June 16, 1991
Author: Emma Coleman Jordan
TODAY, UNIVERSITY-bound black students face a disturbing paradox:

Even though their academic achievements are likely to be stronger than

those of their parents, they will be demeaned by racial stereotyping as

cruel as any faced by their grandparents

“Sometimes I wonder why I am here,” says Dierdre Davis, of Riverdale,

N.Y., a black, first-year law student at the University of California at

Berkeley. Like most of the many minority students I have talked to at

law schools around the country in recent weeks, Davis is quick to add

that she is not defeated by the hostility she sometimes encounters. “My

personal self-doubt is sometimes a source of strength. I have great

opportunities and I take advantage of them,” she adds.

Davis’s strength is more surprising than her second thoughts about

the path that she and other black students at predominately white

colleges and universities have chosen. To get a sense of that strength,

imagine for a moment how you would feel if you were a black student at

the University of Michigan two years ago and encountered graffiti

reading “A mind is a terrible thing to waste, especially on a nigger.”

Or if, last September, you were one of three black law students at Yale

who found a note in their mailboxes signed “Yale Students for Racism.”

The note stated that a female student had been raped off-campus by “two

black men . . . . Now do you know why we call you NIGGERS?”

I asked Yale law professor Drew Days, a former assistant attorney

general for civil rights, about the impact of the incident. It was, he

said, “most serious upon the first-year black students, because they . .

. felt embattled and under siege, particularly those students who have

said: ‘Well, the world may be tough out there but now I am going to

Yale, and it’s a liberal environment . . . .’ They were sort of taken

aback by the viciousness.” Days concludes that “there really are no safe

havens in this society, not even in the universities.”

For Stanford Law School Dean Paul Brest, “the highly publicized

racial incidents tend to prime the pump,” confirming past

interpretations and leading observers to put a racial cast on campus

events even where none may, in fact, be warranted. The heightened racial

hostility in campus life poses a central challenge to leaders of the

academic community: how to preserve the dignity and self-confidence of

what all agree is the best-prepared generation of black students.

Virtually no one has objected to the debate over affirmative-action

policy when cast in civil terms. However, the debate on the merits often

proceeds in an atmosphere made hostile by blatant racism.

For example, the breach of confidentiality and the focus on

test-score differences that fueled the recent controversy at Georgetown

Law Center, where I teach, were not unique. Prof. Robert Gorman of the

University of Pennsylvania Law School told me that “a virtually

identical but less publicized series of events arose at Penn, with

Asians being the focus of attention.” Similarly, at Yale Law School, a

white male student circulated test scores and grade-point averages for

blacks, Asians, Latino and Native American students. Similar incidents

occurred at the University of Texas Law School and Touro Law School in

New York.

Nor was the ugly Yale rape incident a singular event. A similar story

was concocted by a George Washington female student and published as

truth in the GW student newspaper last December. Persistent racial

stereotypes of black men as sexually violent make life hard for talented

black students like Steven Nesmith, the first student of any race to

become student bar association president at Georgetown Law Center at the

end of his first year. Nesmith used to live in the Dupont Circle area

but says he has moved to an area where there are fewer blacks because,

in his old neighborhood, he constantly had to deal with these

“subliminal messages.” Ironically, he faces the same problem in his new

suburban neighborhood.

Nor are black students unaware — how can they be? — of general

societal attitudes such as those from a 1990 survey showing that 53

percent of respondents viewed blacks as less intelligent than whites,

with 62 percent seeing blacks as lazy. They too read the fashionable

conservative intellectuals such as the University of Chicago’s Allan

Bloom, author of “The Closing of the American Mind,” who wrote that

“affirmative action now institutionalizes the worst aspect of

separatism. The fact is . . . the university degree of a black student

is also tainted, and employers look on it with suspicion or become

guilty accomplices in the toleration of incompetence.”

Indeed, the pervasiveness of discrimination faced by black law

students was made evident when a partner in one of the world’s largest

law firms, Baker and McKenzie, used an interview question to ask a black

woman student at the University of Chicago how she would react to being

called “a black bitch.” The school banned the firm for a year.

For Caroline Smith, a graduate of predominantly black Fisk University

who graduated last month from Georgetown Law Center, attacks on black

intellectual ability are “psychological torture. We know we’ve worked

hard, our B-pluses are the same as the next person’s; but society is

sending a message that we haven’t done as well.”

Kelly Dermody, a white graduate of Harvard College, now a first-year

law student at Berkeley, sees the negative message to black students

being driven home in every class she attends. People of color, Dermody

notes, get less respect in class. White classmates “are more likely to

shift in their seats; you know — interrupt, take them on, just the sort

of rude behaviors that people have when they don’t respect what someone

is saying.” It’s difficult to weigh the full impact of the atmosphere of

peer hostility at predominantly white universities. Compared to the

outrageous “silencing” of Gen. Benjamin O. Davis when he was a cadet at

West Point 60 years ago, today’s slights are pale. Still, they exact a

painful toll. In the past few months, I have talked with scores of

students, faculty and deans of many races at the law schools of Howard,

Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Georgetown, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Chicago and

North Carolina. In these conversations, I discerned four sometimes

overlapping styles for coping among blacks seeking to excel in academic

life.

First, one group has chosen to agree with conservative critics that

affirmative action itself is the source of the racial discounting of

their individual attainments. Yale law professor Stephen Carter, for

example, writes, “No matter what my accomplishments, I have had trouble

escaping an assumption that often seems to underlie the worst forms of

affirmative action: that black people cannot compete intellectually with

white people . . . . We yearn to be called what our achievements often

deserve: simply the best — no qualifiers needed!”

A second group has chosen to confront pervasive racism directly,

seeking to redefine the intellectual framework in which the debate

occurs. Derrick Bell, for example, a senior black Harvard law professor

and a leading proponent of “critical race” legal theory, seeks in his

book, “And We Are Not Saved,” to “express jurisprudential matters . . .

in a language and format more usual in literature than in law.” Barack

Obama , the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review,

is representative of a younger generation of black achievers who feel

that “people like myself are learning a certain language of mainstream

society, of power and decisionmaking. We have an obligation to go back

to the black community, to listen and learn and help give our people a

voice.”

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1992

Vote ‘Em . . .

SNEED
Chicago Sun-Times - Sunday, August 2, 1992
Author: Michael Sneed

Sneed hears a massive voter registration drive on the South and West sides is being conducted by Gary Gardner, president of Soft Sheen products, Joe Gardner, former strategist for Mayor Harold Washington, and Barack Obama , a state director of Project Vote, a national voter registration group.

SNEED
Chicago Sun-Times - Thursday, October 15, 1992
Author: Michael Sneed

Tipsville . . .

Dateline: City Hall - Watch for City Planning Commissioner Valerie Jarrett to hire Michelle Robinson- Obama , an assistant to Mayor Daley’s former chief of staff, Dave Mosena, as her new point person responsible for monitoring the city’s major business expansion and retention efforts.

`Project Vote’ Brings Power to the People
Chicago Sun-Times - Tuesday, August 11, 1992
Author: Vernon Jarrett
Good news! Good news!

Project Vote, a collectivity of 10 church-based community organizations dedicated to black voter registration, is off and running.

Project Vote is increasing its rolls at a 7,000-per-week clip. Just last Saturday it registered 2,000 during the Chicago Defender’s annual Bud Billiken Parade.

But now, the not-so-good news:

If Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering 150,000 out of an estimated 400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, “it must average 10,000 rather than 7,000 every week,” says Barack Obama , the program’s executive director.

The current drive will end Oct. 5, the last day for registration for the Nov. 3 general elections.

“Our biggest problem is the young, the 18 to 35 group,” said Obama , 31, the first African American to serve as president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. “There’s a lot of talk about `black power’ among the young but so little action.”

During the 1982 preparation for the 1983 victories of the late Mayor Harold Washington, a similar drive waved the slogan “Come Alive by October 5.” The current drive’s new banner is “It’s a Power Thing,” which is loaded with logic.

“Today, we see hundreds of young blacks talking `black power’ and wearing Malcolm X T-shirts,” Obama explained, “but they don’t bother to register and vote. We remind them that Malcolm once made a speech titled `The Ballot or the Bullet,’ and that today we’ve got enough bullets in the streets but not enough ballots.”

The best news from Obama is that Project Vote, which has the financial backing of Soft Sheen hair-care magnate Edward Gardner, may become a permanent, year-round program based on:

Ongoing community “accountability sessions” that include surveillance of black as well as other elected officials. Continuous voter education on crucial issues facing the City Council, the state legislature and the U.S. Congress - broken down in laymen’s language understandable at the grass-roots level.

“All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly,” Obama said. “If we’re registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who’s responsible.”

Constructive channels for people to vent their concerns. Rioting, arson and neighborhood destruction may dramatize black despair, but they don’t solve problems.

Obama , whose late father was from Kenya, notes that many of his African relatives live in a one-party state and therefore look at American blacks with envy. “They can’t understand why we don’t relish the opportunity to vote for whomever we please.”

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