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FEBRUARY 24 2000
THIS WAY FOR BLACK EMPOWERMENT By Dr. Lenora Fulani
Scapegoats, billionaires, wrestlers: A weekend in the Reform Party
n sports, when a team blows a sea
son, its traditional that someone has
to be scapegoated. It's unfortunate,
but more often than not, it's the rules
of the game.
The Reform Party meeting in Nash
ville this past weekend had something of
that character. Chairman Jack Gargan
and the Executive Committee, who had
been at utter loggerheads with one an
other since Gargan had been elected in
an upset victory last July, had together
brought the party to a stalemate. Gargan
became the scapegoat for the leadership's
across-the-board failure and was recalled
from his position.
Now the party, under the leadership of
newly elected interim chairman Pat
Choate must move on. The first step is to
challenge the misrepresentations of the
state of the party by the media.
For example, the media is now saying
that what happened in Nashville ils that
the Ross Perot forces, the so-called “Dal
las camp” regained control of the party
from the Jesse Ventura faction, the so
called “Minnesota forces.” This is the
standard and incorrect depiction of the
party. First of all, the vote to remove
Jack Gargan was a mixed vote. It wasn't
simply a vote by Perot loyalists. It in
cluded Perot supporters and supporters
of Pat Buchanan and some people who
are neither. Some who voted for recall
had voted for Gargan in Dearborn, but
felt the situation was unsalvageable.
They might have been unhappy about
scapegoating Gargan, but felt they had
no choice
What's more, being able to muster the
votes on the National Committee for re
call doesn't give you a complete and accu-
CIVIL RIGHTS JOURNAL By Bernice Powell Jackson
Making Black History part 2
tls African-American History Month
— a time when all Americans, not
just African Americans — can cel
ebrate and learn more about the many
and varied contributions of African
Americans to this nation. Until we all
come to know those contributions, we
who are African Americans will continue
to be seen as outsiders, as people who are
favored to be here. Too often, our history
has been erased — as in the case of the
Tulsa race riot, which was all but erased
from the collective memory of Oklaho
mans and all Americans. In other in
stances, our African-American children
do not know the stories of the people
upon whose shoulders they stand.
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
The people of Birmingham, Ala. are
determined that future generations will
know their own history and now of the
many sacrifices which African Amenri
cans in Birmingham and throughout the
South made. Thus, in the 1980 s Mayor
Richard Arrington put together a com
mittee to develop the Birmingham Civil
Rights Institute. Odessa Woolfolk be
came the head of that planning commit
tee.
Odessa Woolfolk was born and raised
in Birmingham. Her mother was a school
teacher and her father a craftsman. A
product of the Birmingham public school
system, she went to nearby Talledega
College and then returned to her home
‘own as a teacher herself Eight years
iater she moved to upstate New York and
spent time at Yale University, the Uni
versity of Chicago and Occidental Col
lege in Los Angeles while earning her
master's degree in urban studies. Then
in 1972 she returned to the University of
Alabama at Birmingham. When the
mayor tapped her to lead the planning
for the new museum, she agreed, believ
ng that “Birmingham needed to not run
away from the issues that had been so
rippling to us in the past,” adding, “we
aeeded to accept our history as history.
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Commentary
rate picture of the state of the party.
The Perot camp, for example, Joes have
a significant presence on the Executive
Committee and on the National Com
mittee. Yet at the level of the state party
organizations, there are multiple other
forces in play. For example, it was the
Minnesota party which succeeded in
electing Governor Jesse Ventura. In New
York, Reform’s affiliate, the Indepen
dence Party, hasover 150,000 registrants,
the coveted third position on the ballot
and has polled millions of votes for its
candidates since 1994, making it the
potential swing factor in future elections
given the surge of independent voting for
political reform. The California Reform
Party has over 86,000 registrants and
has polled hundreds of thousands of votes
for its candidates. Ironically, the national
Reform Party has yet to show it can get
votes for a presidential candidate. After
all, it was Ross Perot and Pat Choate's
vote in 1996 that created the Reforni
Party, not the other way around. Pat
Choate was elected Reform’s interim
chair. He's a good man, intelligent and
very principled. I've worked closely with
him. I supported his candidacy. If any
one can do the job that's needed now, he
can.
The press sometimes referstohim as a
“Perot person.” Others call him a
“Buchanan person.” But Pat Choate is
neither a Perot person nor a Buchanan
person. Pat Choate is a Choate person.
He works with lots of different forces and
he has many friends. | consider myself
one of them. [ believe he stands for the
kinds of things that will help our party
move forward.
He's already made a statement about
And we had to show people we were
better than our history ™
Indeed, the history of Birmingham is
an important one in the struggle of Afri
can Americans for freedom. Many blacks
came to that industrial city in the early
days of the 20" century to work in the
steel industry and it soon developed a
significant black middle class. During
the 1950 s and '6os, they formed the
nucleus of the civil rights movement
which threatened Bull Connor and oth
ers in power who were determined that
blacks would stay segregated. There
were so many bombings of African-Ameri
can homes and churches during those
days that the city became known as
Bombingham. And it was in Birming
ham that white supremacists struck only
weeks after the 1963 March on Washing
ton, bombing the 16" Street Baptist
Church and killing four little girls who
were attending Sunday school.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Insti
tute chronicles all of that history and
more, telling of the Freedom Rides, of the
Montgomery bus boycott and of the many
sit-ins and boycotts led by young people
across the South. It puts the civil rights
movement of the U.S. in the larger con
text of the struggle for human rights
around the world. It tells the story of the
many unknown people who stood up to
the powerful forces of evil so that African
Americans would have the opportunity
to vote, to eat and drink and be educated
along side their white counterparts.
Odessa Woolfolk understood that his
tory and worked to make sure that young
African Americans and others would
know that history, too. Now, eifiht years
after the opening of the Civil Rights
Institute, she can be proud of her contri
bution to making sure that African-
American history of struggle would not
be lost. She understood that the best way
to honor Black History is to make some
— and in her case, the making was in the
telling. Thanks, Mrs. Woolfolk.
how important the political reform issue
is to the party and tothe American people.
I think he recognizes, as do 1, that the
party has an enormous opportunity now.
The American people are clamoring for
reform and it’s our responsibility to ar
ticulate a very clear statement that in
spite of their rhetoric, George Bush is no
reformer, John McCain is no reformer,
Al Goreis noreformer and Bill Bradley s
no reformer. Using the word “reform”
doesn’t make you a reformer, especially
if you're a Democrat or a Republican.
What the American people are saying
needs to be reformed are Democratic and
Republican party politics. That's why
you have to be an independent to be a
reformer. Pat Choate 1s a wonderful
spokesperson in this regard and I will
work with him to bring that message out.
In my opinion, those who stand with him
are the future of the Reform Party.
The post-Nashville announcement by
Donald Trump that he is not running for
President is the final act in an elaborate
public relations scheme that was never a
serious candidacy. In his home state of
New York, candidates for Reform con
vention delegate pledged to Trump were
knocked off the ballot because their peti
tions violated state election law. Attor
neys for the case suggested to the judge
that his candidacy was a fraud upon the
members of the Independence Party who
signed his petitions. That turned out to
be correct.
With respect to Governor Ventura's
decision to leave the party, | honestly
don’t know where he will end up. This s
a long hard process that we're involved
in and [ would hope that at some point
Governor Ventura will change his mind.
TO BE EQUAL By Guest Columnist Lee A. Daniels
Lynching — another “honorable”
aspect of the Southern heritage
oday's conventional wisdom about
the lynchingof African Americans
in America, which mostly occurred
in the South from the 1880 s to the
19605, is that it was a furtive event, done
at night by a few backward individuals
and that it was not condoned by the
“decent white people of the South,” as the
phrase of choice went.
That's the comfortable conventional
wisdom about lynching.
The truth is far more disturbing.
In fact, the truth is horrifving.
That horror has been set before America
and the world by a just-published book,
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photogra
phy in America.
Drawn from the private collection of its
principal author,James Allen, an antiques
dealer in Atlanta, Ga., the book presents
photographs and postcards of lynchings
that were once übiquitous as commercial
merchandise and keepsake itemsthrough
out much of White America.
There are some pictures of whites who
were hanged as well.
But most of the lynchings photographs
are of black men, and occasionally, black
women, who fell to a maelstrom of vio
lence that often involved not just hanging
but also gruesome torture and mutilation
that bordered on cannibalism.
As the historian Leon Litwack notes in
a quietly powerful essay, “From the 1880«
to the 19205, two or three black Southern
ers were hanged, burned at the stake, or
otherwise murdered every week. In the
1890 s, lynchings claimed an average of
139 lives a vear, 75 percent of whom were
black. While the total numbers declined
in the following years, the percentage of
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We're trying to build an independent
party at a time when more and more
dents. That's a great opportunity, and it
also makes the stakes much higher. The
Democrats and Republicans have had
very fractious moments in their histo
ries, including at their beginnings.
I don't agree with Governor Ventura's
statement that the Reform Party was no
part of his victory. Ross Perot may not
have campaigned for him, but Reform
Party activists across the country gave
what they could to his campaign. Plus,
Ventura benefitted from the Minnesota
Reform Party's connection to the na
tional party. It gave him a location in a
movement that amplified his indepen
dent appeal to the voters.
The next steps are to unify behind Pat
Choate, to further articulate our per
spective on political reform, and to make
sure that our nominee articulates that
perspective. We've got to show that the
Reform Party has the capacity to get
votes on the political reform issues. Po
litical reform 1s an un-cooptable issue.
The Democrats and Republicans cannot
co-opt it, since it 1s all about the Issue of
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black victims rose to 90 percent.”
In the eight decades between the 1880 s
and the 19605, an estimated 4,742 blacks
met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.
Perhaps an equal number were victims
of the “legal lynchings” of sham tnals
leading to immediate executions, and, as
Litwack writes, of “nigger hunts” — that is,
they were murdered by a variety of means
in Isolated rural sections and dumped into
creeks and rivers.”
The lynchings occurred in all sorts of
places - in city and town squares as well as
on isolated rural roads and bridges. These
(and pogroms like the one that destroyed
Greenwood, the black neighborhood of
Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921) were commu
nal events, sometimes drawing hundreds,
sometimes thousands of white men,
women and children.
“As in most lynchings, the guilt of the
victim had not been proven in a court of
law,” Litwack declares. “Asin most lynch
ings, no member of the crowd wore a
mask, nor did anyone attempt to conceal
the names of the perpetrators; indeed,
newspaper reporters noted the active par
ticipation of some of the region’s most
prominent citizens. As in most lynchings,
the white press and public expressed its
solidarity in the name of white supremacy
and ignored any information that contra
dicted the people’s verdict.”
Noblack American, especially those liv
ing in the South, was immune from the
awful possibility of falling prey to what
John Lewis, the Congressman and civil
rights veteran, rightly calls “an American
holocaust.”
Some of the photographs in Allen's ex
tensive collection were recently on view at
Charles W Walker
Publisher
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Managing Edutor
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Marketing Director
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the corruption of their own parties. |
the public that Reform is an even bigger
corruption and that the events of this
weekend are the proof. | think we have to
be aware of this danger. And we have to
can people that we put the reforming of
the American political process above all
other considerations. We've got to be
have that way We've got to get that
message out. If we don't do that, the
American people will say, why go for a
new brand of corruption when we've got
the old one. And they'd be right What
the Reform Party stands for is being
independent of political corruption.
That's our message in the 2000 presiden
tial campaign.
Lenora B. Fulani twice ran for Presi
dent of the U.S. as an independent, mak
ing history in 1988 when she became the
first woman and African American to get
on the ballot in all 50 states. Dr. Fulani s
currently a leading activist in the Reform
Party and chairs the Commuttee for a
Unified Independent Party. She can be
reached at 800-288-3201 or at
www.fulani.org.
the Roth Horowitz gallery in New York
City, drawing whites and people of color
who waited in long lines outside the gal
lery and often emerged from the viewing
in stunned silence.
That exhibit has closed. But officials of
the special collections department of the
Robert W. Woodruff Library of Atlanta’s
Emory University, which houses the Allen-
Littlefield Collection, have said they in
tend to stage a more extensive exhibit
there within the next year
In the meantime, Allen's book 1s avail
able from Twin Palms Publishers, of Santa
Fe, New Mexico.
Be warned: The photographs and de
scriptions of lynching in this book (and
other studies of lynching) will shock and
horrify the decent people.
But they must be seen. Because the
nightmansh reality they document de
stroys the glib notion fashionable in some
quarters that we're too obsessed with the
country’s racial past and that we should
all just face forward and let the past stay
in the past.
In fact, we've still only just begun to
learn the real truth of America's racial
past. The horrifying history of the lynch
ing of African Americans must be faced for
at least three reasons.
First, these photographs illuminate the
fundamental evil nature of the virus of
racism that gripped White America in the
years before the 19605. Lynchings were
not an “aberration.” They were a central
partof the means by which White America
oppressed blacks.
Secondly, these photographs showing
White America at its worst illuminate the
extraordinary determination of African
Americans to not merely survive such con
centrated horror, but to continue to try to
forge a record of stability and achievement.
Finally, this record of horror under
scores the great, nonviolent allegiance of
African Americans to the American ideal
of freedom and democracy, and the great
courage they and their white allies, in
in continuing to fight for their human
rights through even the worst moments of
violence.
It is these responses to the horror which
redeem the suffering of all the ghosts of
enormous wrongs these photographs rep-
It is these responses to the horror which
make it worth our while to study this
documentary record.
It is these responses to the horror which
makes it possible for us to believe, still, that
America has a future worth working for.
Lee A. Daniels is director of publica
tions for the National Urban League.