Year: 2009

by

The Strange Story of Lloyd Gaines

Never heard of Lloyd Gaines?  I hadn’t either until about 2 hours ago when I read the story in today’s New York Times.  Buried on page 19, is the story of a Supreme Court decision I had never heard of and the mystery surrounding the plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines.

Mr. Gaines left his apartment in Chicago on the night of March 19, 1939, three months after the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Missouri had to admit him to law school.

On Dec. 12, 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregated University of Missouri Law School had to admit Lloyd Lionel Gaines, who was qualified except for the color of his skin, if there was no comparable legal education available to him within Missouri — and there was not.

Despite his victory, Mr. Gaines was troubled. He had told relatives and friends he was having trouble finding steady work to earn money for school (apparently one reason he went to Chicago), and he was ambivalent about being in the spotlight.

“As for my publicity relative to the university case, I have found that my race still likes to applaud, shake hands, pat me on the back and say how great and noble is the idea,” he wrote his mother in St. Louis days before disappearing. “How historical and socially important the case but — and there it ends.” He added, “Sometimes I wish I were just a plain, ordinary man whose name no one recognized.”

For the 1930s, Missouri’s policy was enlightened: since there was no law school at Lincoln, the state paid the tuitions of blacks from Missouri who went to nearby states to study law. And the Missouri legislature had committed itself to establishing a law school at Lincoln someday, should there ever be enough demand.

But Mr. Gaines said he wanted to go to the University of Missouri’s law school, so in 1936 he sued in state court to gain admission. He lost, but lawyers for the N.A.A.C.P. saw his case as a way to attack the “separate but equal” doctrine laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, which was used to justify public school segregation.

Mr. Gaines’s team was headed by Charles Hamilton Houston, chief litigator for the N.A.A.C.P., mentor to Thurgood Marshall and later dean of the Howard University Law School. The case reached the Supreme Court on Nov. 9, 1938. Houston argued that the state had blatantly failed to meet the “separate but equal” standard and that paying out-of-state tuition for black students from Missouri was not good enough. The court ruled 6 to 2 for Mr. Gaines. “The basic consideration here is not as to what sort of opportunities other states provide, or whether they are as good as those in Missouri, but as to what opportunities Missouri itself furnishes to white students and denies to Negroes solely upon the ground of color,” Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote.

Justices James C. McReynolds and Pierce Butler dissented, saying the State of Missouri ought to be able to set its own education policies. (There was one vacancy on the court.)

The ruling in Gaines v. Canada (S. W. Canada was the university registrar) would eventually open the doors of law schools for blacks in a dozen Southern and border states. And it was a steppingstone toward Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 decision that repudiated the “separate but equal” notion in outlawing school segregation.

So what happened to Mr. Gaines?  Was he murdered?  If so, by a mugger out to rob him or by segregrationists who had stalked him?  Or did he simply decided he did not want to attend the University of Missouri law school, didn’t want to deal with the pressure and just disappear?

Lloyd Gaines’s nephew George Gaines, a retired Navy captain who lives in San Diego, said recently, “We have never had him declared dead.” But Captain Gaines said he doubted that his uncle would have chosen to drop out of life, or end his life, given the perseverance he displayed.

In the early 1950s, the University of Missouri began admitting black students. Lloyd Gaines is now revered at the university, which awarded him an honorary law degree in 2006. That year, the state bar awarded him a law license, posthumously.

If he had lived, would we be celebrating Gaines v. Canada as we do Brown v. Board of Education?    Would Brown have come sooner?  Would Gaines have been the James Meredith of University of Missouri?  On the eve of the start of Senate hearings on the nomination of the first Latino Justice, it is interesting to think about.

by

Al is Official

Al Franken was sworn in today by Vice President Biden with a beaming Vice President Walter Mondale looking on using a Paul Wellstone Family Bible.

Image: Franken is sworn-in at the Capitol in Washington

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Politico.com reports

 Franken’s swearing-in gives Democrats their coveted 60-40 majority, ensuring that they can crush GOP filibusters if they stay united and that Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) can vote despite illnesses they are battling.

Democratic leaders expressed confidence that if the GOP tries to stall legislation, they will be able to keep their caucus unified to overcome the delaying tactics.
On procedural votes, we’ll keep the Democrats together,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday. “We’ve done that in the past. We’ll do it in the future. I would hope the Republicans understand that they should be part of the game here.

…

Among the committees Franken will be seated on are the Senate Judiciary Committee, which begins its debate over the Sotomayor nomination July 13, and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which continues Tuesday its consideration of a sprawling health care bill. 

On his first vote, Franken voted against an Obama bill to take money away from keeping buses safe from terrorism.  No rubber stamp for him.

I think this will be my last post about Al Franken for a while so I want to end with my favorite Franken cartoon.

This is by JEFF KOTERBA (Omaha World Herald / cagle.com).

by

Sign of Al

Is this press overkill or what?    This picture is from the New York Times Caucus blog.

 

A maintenance worker hung a name plate outside the new office of Al Franken on Monday in Washington.

Mark Leibovich blogs

The big fuss awaiting Al Franken on his first day on Capitol Hill was underscored by the 30-or-so reporters and photographers who gathered on the third floor of the Hart Office Building to watch a maintenance guy hang a silver- and brass-rimmed “Al Franken, Minnesota” plaque outside the incoming Democratic senator’s new office (and Norm Coleman’s old office).

…

Then, at precisely 10:30 a.m., the momentarily-famous maintenance guy — later identified as James Pogue, of the superintendent’s office — pulled up on a motorized wheelchair and slapped the pristine plaque on the designated space while cameras clicked. He ignored a shouted question (”What’s your name, sir?”) and carted off into the fluorescent-tinted sunlight.

Only I think it was one of those scooters that people use to get around, not a wheelchair.

by

Tim Wakefield: All-Star

Tim Wakefield and I arrived in Boston around the same time.  I moved here in the fall 1994.  1995 was my first season watching the Red Sox. (I confess that I had live for many years in what was then Atlanta’s triple A city, Richmond, VA within walking distance of the ballpark and watched all the many Atlanta stars get their start.)  1995 was Wake’s first season with the Sox.  So I feel a special bond with Wake and feel so happy for his making the All-Star team.

 

The New York Times’ David Waldstein wrote

The Boston Red Sox will send the largest delegation of players to the 80th All-Star Game in St. Louis with six, and among them is one who has waited 17 years for the honor.

Tim Wakefield, the 42-year-old knuckleballer who has pitched in 18 postseason games, was named to his first All-Star team Sunday by Joe Maddon, the American League manager, after posting a 10-3 record for Boston. Wakefield will join second baseman Dustin Pedroia, outfielder Jason Bay, first baseman Kevin Youkilis, starter Josh Beckett and closer Jonathan Papelbon from the division-leading Red Sox.

Bob Ryan wrote one of his great columns this morning in the Boston Globe.

It has been 14 years since Tim Wakefield put on the finest demonstration of knuckleball pitching in the history of baseball.

No knuckleballer – not Hoyt Wilhelm, not Phil Niekro, not Belmont’s Wilbur Wood – ever has been as dominant over a stretch of time as Wakefield was in 1995 when he went 14-1 at the beginning of his Red Sox career. He flirted with a no-hitter or two, he pitched a 10-inning complete game against the Mariners, and he jump-started the Sox as they won the AL East. It was a virtuoso performance of the highest order.

…

Tim Wakefield is not going to Cooperstown. What he has done is make himself an indispensable member of 15 Red Sox pitching staffs. He has been a comfort to managers and a great teammate. What he did 14 summers ago set an unattainable standard, not only for himself, but for any knuckleballer past, present, or future. Were that all he ever did in service of the Red Sox, it would have been enough for the fans to remember him fondly.

But here he is, 15 summers into his Red Sox career. He is the franchise leader in starts, walks, and, yes, losses. He trails only Cy Young and Roger Clemens in victories. He is second to Clemens in strikeouts. He even shows up among the leaders in saves. If there was a category for Taking One For The Team, he’d be the clear leader in that one, too. He is the Grand Old Man of the Boston pitching staff.

Four weeks shy of his 43d birthday, he is also a first-time All-Star.

Congratulations, Wake.  You deserve the big hug from David Ortiz.  Consider that a hug from all of us.

by

Michael Jackson and Race

It has been more than a week since Michael Jackson was found near death in his rented home in Los Angeles and was pronounced dead at the emergency roon. I haven’t written about Jackson because I couldn’t quite figure out an approach. I have to admit that I liked the Jackson 5, admired “Thriller” and “We are the World”, but never really got into his post-Thriller music. And like everyone else, I spent years watching the horror show that was his life.  Now we are all picking though the comments and observations of everyone who can get air time.

I don’t know for sure if he was physically abused or not. His father says not, but some of his brothers say otherwise and I’m sure they are right. He was clearly psychologically abused.  Jackson used to say he had no childhood because he had to work all the time but I heard Barry Gordy describe pick-up basketball and baseball games with the Jackson kids, his kids and other children of the Motown family. I’m not sure we will ever know the truth. But we did watch him have extensive facial surgery so that his nose almost disappeared and we watched his skin turn paler and paler. (I don’t believe anyone who says he had a skin condition – no one else in his family seems to have a similar problem.) He tried to make himself Caucasian.  I couldn’t look at him anymore.

I heard someone say he sheltered his kids so they would not have a public upbringing. They point to Diana Ross as his role model – she raised kids and few people knew she had them. But he didn’t “shelter” them. He exploited them. The famous balcony scene with the baby, “Blanket”, being held over the edge; the kids – all white, by the way – being dressed up and paraded around. No one can tell me he was trying to shelter them. And now we learn that none of the three have any of Jackson’s DNA.

Patricia Williams  has put this all together for me.  In her column in the Nation, Williams writes

To me, the most arresting image of Michael Jackson was President George H.W. Bush citing him as a role model for young black men. It was 1990 and Jackson was at the height of his fame. “Man in the Mirror” had been released two years earlier. Jackson had not yet gone into full white-face disguise, but the handsome little brown boy of his first album had long since entered the bizarro phase of rhinestone gloves. I wondered then what on earth about Jackson could ever be a role model for anyone. Musical savant though he was, Jackson was, almost from the beginning, a tragic figure–so obviously trapped in that mirror, forever reflecting what others wanted him to be.

In the wake of his death, many have hailed his “crossover appeal.” There is no doubt that his musical acumen led to the integration of MTV; but that “appeal” had a more sinister undertone. If Elvis was “the White Negro,” so Michael fashioned himself into “the Negro Caucasian.” He literally erased himself before our eyes, his nose slowly disappearing, his skin fading to ghostly pallor, his voice growing higher and whispier, his body evaporating to a dry husk of barely a hundred pounds at the time of his death. It was hard not to be fascinated by him as he molted through all possible confusions of gender, race and sexuality. But his transgressivity was more than just theater; he mimed a narrative of constant paradox and infinite suffering.

I can understand the need to appear “lighter”, “whiter”.   I had one grandmother who despaired every summer when my sister and I turned browner and browner.  She believed, as many Japaneses did, that pale skin was a sign of upper classeness and dark skin of being a peasant.

Williams again

But in the longer term, the question of Michael Jackson’s children is challenging in other ways. Like his demands for plastic surgery or painkillers, their conception was accomplished as a made-to-order, cash-on-the-barrelhead commercial transaction. According to TMZ.com and other entertainment news sites, Jackson is not biologically related to any of his three children. Reportedly, the women who gestated them carried anonymously donated eggs fertilized by sperm from secret donors. Apparently the children were all crafted to be “white” enough to match Jackson’s artfully devised if pathetically alienated image of himself. Deborah Rowe, Jackson’s ex-wife and the surrogate who carried his oldest two children to term, describes being inseminated “like a horse”; she then received around $9 million to give up any claim to them. On the birth certificate of Jackson’s youngest child, the space for “mother” is left blank.

It’s hard to imagine that Jackson would have been found fit if he had attempted to adopt children. It is interesting to contemplate the eugenic ends to which in vitro fertilization and surrogate birth are being put these days, often as a kind of end run around the formal inspection of the adoption process. How much more common will the purchase of “the perfect child” become when bioengineering for specific physical traits becomes easier and less costly? It’s not a new problem: “colorism” (preference for lighter skin) is an old problem within the African-American community. Choosing trophy spouses is a cruder version of the same game. Nevertheless, it is troubling that the law of sales is about the only context for debating this rapidly developing area. Shouldn’t we think harder about the degree to which a free market for eugenics is enabled by easy-payment contract clauses conferring parenthood through the immaculate conception of biotechnology?

We can only hope that Michael Jackson leaves a legacy that is more than his music and that through his children we can begin a serious dialogue about genetic engineering.  This would be a very positive thing to leave behind.

by

The last word from Sarah Palin? – Don’t count on it.

If I recall my history correctly President Nixson once said before he became President “you won’t have Dick Nixson to kick around anymore” or words to that effect.  Is Sarah Palin trying to emulate him?  Is she planning a comeback?  Before her suprise announcement yesterday, I was researching the Palin (Todd and Sarah) connection to the Alaska Independence Party prompted by the reported Vanity Fair/CBS quotes from emails.  Back in October 2008, before the election, I wrote a piece about Bill Ayres and Todd Palin in which I quoted some members of the AIP.  It was clear back then, and it is clearer now that the Palins were invoved with the AIP for a number of years.

I guess I was not the only one because Andrew Sullivan wrote about her lies yesterday in his Atlantic magazine blog.  During the campaign, the Todd Palin-AIP connection was surfacing and Sarah Palin evidently was trying to do damage control by claiming Todd just meant to register “independent”.  Sullivan writes about McCain campaign official, Steve Schmidt’s response

To his eternal credit, Schmidt fired back

“Secession. It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

We will not put out a statement and inflame this and create a situation where john has to adress this.”

And then there is the Los Angeles Times column from September 2008 by Rosa Brooks

It’s untrue that Palin has no foreign policy experience, anyway. In fact, she appears to have seriously flirted with the idea of trying to turn Alaska into a foreign country. How many vice presidential candidates can put that on their resumes?

Over the years, Palin has actively courted the Alaska Independence Party, or AIP, an organization that supports Alaskan secession from the U.S. To be clear, we’re not necessarily talking about friendly secession either: As the AIP’s founder, Joe Vogler, told an interviewer in 1991: “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. … And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. could learn from this man.

The McCain campaign denies that Palin ever joined the AIP. But while it is in dispute whether she attended its 1994 convention, she did visit the 2000 one and addressed AIP conventions in 2006 and 2008. Her husband, Todd, was a registered AIP member from 1995 to 2002, and the AIP leadership certainly considers her one of their own.

Video footage shows AIP Vice Chairman Dexter Clark describing Palin at the 2007 North American Secessionist Convention as an “AIP member before she got the job as a mayor of a small town — that was a nonpartisan job. But you get along to go along. She eventually joined the Republican Party, where she had all kinds of problems with their ethics, and well, I won’t go into that.” (No need to. The Alaska Legislature’s ethics investigators are on the case.) Apparently with Palin in mind, Clark then went on to urge AIP members to “infiltrate” the major parties.

So if Sarah Palin wants to be President, she will have to not only make all this go away, she will also have to overcome the idea that she is a quitter. 

 Sarah Palin

All political commentators (including me) will miss her if her incomprehensible resignation speech is her last public word.  As Gail Collins wrote in her New York Times column today

Truly, Sarah Palin has come a long way. When she ran for vice president, she frequently became disjointed and garbled when she departed from her prepared remarks. Now the prepared remarks are incoherent, too.

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time … to BUILD UP.”

Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.

…

Palin was the subject of a devastating article in this month’s Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, who wrote that McCain campaign aides found it almost impossible to get Palin to prepare for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. And there is no sign, Purdum reported, that Palin has made any attempt to bone up on the issues so that next time around, she could run as a candidate who actually had some grasp of the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy.

So if she’s starting to run, it will be as the same reporter-avoiding, generalization-spouting underachiever that she was last time around.

Now we know she not only doesn’t have the concentration to read a policy paper, she can’t focus long enough to finish the job she was hired to do.

by

The Top Ten things I hate about riding the T

I ride the Boston subway system regularly.  It is relatively inexpensive, and is generally efficient.  But is can also drive one crazy.  So here is my Top Ten of things I hate about riding the MBTA:

10.  The new cloth seatcovers that make it difficult to tell if the seat is wet.

9.   People who take up more than one seat because, hey, their package  (or briefcase or backpack) needs a seat also.

8.   Men who take up more than one seat because they insist on spreading their legs.

7.  People who stand in front of empty seats.

6.  The conductor who has never figured out how to use the mike to announce stops so you can understand them which is closely related to

5.  The  T management which has taken the individuality out of the annoucements (I used to have one who sang the stops and another who annouced the historic sites at each stop.)

4.  People who can’t converse without being loud and using excessive profanity.

3.  People who play their music so loudly I can hear it from across the aisle and down the car – and they are using ear phones.

2.  People who have loud cell phone conversations – especially when they are personal.

1.  People who insist on standing in front of the door and seem to not understand that they need to move so you can get off. 

I’m not David Letterman, but I do my best.

by

Finally, Senator Al Franken

After a ballot counting process that went though all four seasons (election day was fall and it is now summer), Norm Coleman has conceded after the Minnesota Supreme Court rule unanimously in Al Franken’s favor.  He is now the winner by 312 votes.

According to the New York Times

Mr. Coleman’s announcement followed a unanimous state Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday in Mr. Franken’s favor. There, the case had centered, in part, around whether some absentee ballots had been wrongly excluded and standards had been inconsistent, as Mr. Coleman contended.

But in their 5-0 ruling, the court found that Mr. Coleman had failed to prove that “the trial court’s findings of fact are clearly erroneous or that the court committed an error of law or abused its discretion.”

Franken represents vote 60 for the Democratic Caucus.  According to TPM

Franken said that the country faces many challenges in the economy and world affairs. “So even though Franni and I are thrilled and honored by the faith that Minnesotans have placed in me, I’m also humbled,” he said, “not just by the closeness of this election, but also by the enormity of the responsibilities that come with this office.”

He also said that much has been talked about, that he’ll be the 60th Democratic Senator. “The way I see it, I’m not going to wash[ington] to be the 60th democratic senator. I’m going to washington to be the second senator from minnesota, and that’s how I’m going to do this job,” he said, to the applause of his supporters.

by

Hypocracy about marriage

It is 40 years now since the Stonewall Riots first brought gay and lesbian civil rights into the public spotlight.  People who are gay or lesbian still can marry only in New England (except for Rhode Island) and Iowa.  They can’t serve in the miliary if they are openly expressing their sexuality.  The issue of ordination of homosexuals is spliting the Methodist and Episcopal churches.  And it appears that those leaders who are most vocal about the scanctity of marriage being only between a man and a woman are the most likely to divorce and the most likely to be as Jon Stewart put it “…just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis.”

This is the graphic from Charles M. Blow’s op ed in the New York Times on Mark Sanford.

Blow writes

Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. According to The Post and Courier of Charleston, Sanford called Clinton’s behavior “reprehensible” and said, “I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally” to resign. “I come from the business side. … If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.” Remember that Mr. Sanford?

And this kind of hypocrisy isn’t confined to the politicians. It permeates the electorate. While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.

Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.

A little bragging here:  Massachusetts was the first to legalize gay marriage and we are at the bottom of the list in divorce and teen pregancy. 

So we need less hypocacry from the conservative camp and a lot more reality.  I really don’t think anyone, except the politician’s family, cares about them having an affair as long as other laws (Spitzer and Vitter engaging prostitutes which is still illegal or Ensign and potential conflict of interest) are not also broken.  But please, practice what you preach or shut-up and don’t interfere with legal abortions or birth control or with the right of homosexuals to get married. 

As Maureen Dowd put it

Sanford can be truly humble only if he stops dictating to others, who also have desires and weaknesses, how to behave in their private lives.

The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.

by

Rafael Nadal as a role model for young athletes

I’ve just come back from visiting my mother a 90 year old tennis fanantic.  I picked up last week’s New York Times Magazine and there, on the cover, is Rafael Nadal, the curremt number one in men’s tennis and as well as the current heartthrob for women.  I look at Nadal and Federer as Borg and McEnroe:  Borg was the pin-up but they could both play tennis.

What really stood out for me in the Times article by Cynthia Gorney is the discussion of Rafael Nadal’s character. Like many professional tennis players,  he has little formal education but he is educated in ways that are perhaps more important.

He signs the balls and the bare arms and the T-shirts. He rumples small boys’ hair. He waits while people press up alongside him to pose for snapshots. The Nadal personality stories that circulate among tournament fans are all variations on a single theme: the young man is educado, as they say in Spanish, not so much educated in the formal sense (Nadal left conventional schooling after he turned pro at 15), but courteous, respectful, raised by a family with its priorities in order. Nadal may have the on-court demeanor of a hit man, as far as the party across the net is concerned, but you will never see this champion hurl his racket during a match.

Nadal is coached by his uncle, Toni Nadal,  and still lives in Majorca in a small town surrounded by relatives.

“It’s about respect,” Toni told me. “It’s really easy for these guys to start thinking the world revolves around them. I never could have tolerated it if Rafael had become a good player and a bad example of a human being. I was at a symposium recently and a trainer said to me, ‘Look, if you ask a young player’s father which he’d rather get at the end of this process — a courteous person or the French Open champion — you know what that father is going to say.’ And I said: ‘No, that’s all wrong. Because if that player is brought up courteous, brought up as a respectful person, he’s got a better chance to reach the championship of the French Open — because it’s going to be easier for him to accomplish the hard work.’ ”

This is what is missing in someone like Kobe Bryant  who appears to think that live evolves around him.  It is not missing – although I think it came close to be missing – in Paul Pierce.  People talk about the current Red Sox team and call people like Jason Bay, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Dustin Pedroia boring, but they appear to have the sense of self that is missing in so many “stars”. 

Rafael Nadal spent three year ranked second in the world with only Roger Federer ahead of him. 

Nadal was a phenomenal No. 2. His No. 2-ness was heroic and inspirational, and he was known to mention it quite cheerfully in press conferences: “I’m not the best, but I am a very good No. 2 in the world.”

The world needs more of this kind of attitude from both the talented kids – and from their parents.