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8A 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. Subscribe to the award winning Augusta Focus for only $24.95 per year. Call (706) 724-7855. 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 Augusta Focus Since 1981 A Walker Group Publication 1143 Laney Walker Blvd. 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 The Augusta Focus has won a 1999 ADDY for the cover of the Spring 1999 issue of “The Georgia Investor” and a 1999 Citation of Excellence for the “Pride” cover of the Oct. 21, 1999 issue of the “ARTbeatv” tabloid at the Augusta Advertising Federation’s American Advertising Awards competition. 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 Frederick Benjamin Managing Edutor Dot T. Ealy Marketing Director Lillian Wan Capy Edutor Timothy Cox Staff Writer Eileen Rivers Staff Writer Tonya Evans Office Manager Frank Johnson Sr. Circulation Manager Samuel Daniels Production Assistant 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.