Les Payne       

July 4, 2009

As Venus and Serena Williams made the U.S. proud this 4th of July over at Wimbledon, I discussed with Earl Caldwell whether President Obama brings new meaning to this "Independence" holiday. The WBAI radio host lobbed into my court the question: "Is Obama good for black people?" I fore-handed it back over the net as best I could.

We then switched to the unfolding last act of Michael Jackson, the greatest show on  earth. As a picture is worth a 1,000, the spoken word must also be allowed to stand for itself.

So, let's go to the audio tape:

Les Payne

June 27, 2009

The eulogizing of Michael Jackson occasionally stoops to compare this soaring genius to Elvis Presley of the one-trick, and even Madonna of the clay-feet.

This is truly freakish.

I lived through the Elvis era and endure, as we still must, the con of the Material Girl. Neither of these magpies had a creative pinion in their wings. What flight they enjoyed was due mainly to mimicry, tribal lust, and press-agentry. The base talent of Madonna, alas, can be pulled through the eye of a needle; while that of the “king,” as compared to Jackson, could barely fill a thimble.

All artists go through an imitative stage; the trick is to strike out boldly for one’s own territory. The creative impact an artist exerts upon his generation is measured not by hoopla but rather by the distance his work outpaces that of those who came before him.

Michael Jackson took pop music to a new frontier.

The claim he staked--with imagination, hard work and sheer will--ranged beyond rote method as his art challenged the limits and toyed even with science itself. Whether moon-walking

Les Payne

June 24, 2009

John McCain is still crazy after all those votes; and angry too. After losing the ‘08 election, the senator thrives at critiquing the every move of the President who vanquished him.

Worse still, the media have also enabled former vice-president Dick Chaney to assess his White House successor, a tact equivalent to allowing a man to grade the performance of his ex-wife’s new husband. As the scowl of Cheney drives away viewers the networks turn more and more to the Arizona senator.

McCain-Palin, lest we forget, carried the white vote, 55-43 percent nationally. Thus, they remain something of this group’s preferred choice for the White House, as the media pretend to be undecided.

When President Obama said he was “appalled and outraged” Tuesday at the deaths and government crackdown in the streets of Teheran; McCain said he should have spoken even “more strongly.” By now, this preferred candidate presumably would have taken to the barricades personally and, perhaps, declared himself and all Americans as “Iranians.”

McCain, after all, is the hot-tempered maverick who—without checking with us—

Les Payne

June 25, 2009

Speaking of nutty politicians, consider the 37th President of the United States. That would be Richard Milhous Nixon.

The secret, White House recorder he rigged to snare enemies and loose quotes for his version of history continues to slash at his presidency like some celluloid Freddie Kruger that just won’t keep to the crypt.

Another passel of secret tapes and telephone recordings has been released covering the year 1973. In addition to executing the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Nixon found time to noodle over the horrors of miscegenation.

As if firing the special prosecutor investigating White House involvement in the Watergate scandal was not enough, Nixon made it a massacre by forcing the resignations of the U.S. attorney general and his deputy along with loyal staffers.

Lest younger generations consider “massacre” an exaggeration, be assured, it was a remember-where-you-were moment for baby-boomers worried about...

    “Negro Soldiers In Action.” 

    This 1863, Harper’s Weekly’ illustration by Thomas Nast shows a full infantry charge of the First Kansas Volunteer Colored unit

    during the Civil War. In the Battle of Island Mounds, the First Kansas Volunteer regiment routed a Rebel regiment.

Les Payne

June 19, 2009

The thorny issue of a U.S. apology to African-Americans for 246 years of slavery seemed to stump Sen. Barack Obama when we put the question to the presidential candidate in Aug. 2007.

“To be honest with you,” he told The Trotter Group of black columnists, “I’ll have to think about that. My question is who is apologizing? If I’m the [U.S.] President, certainly, I could issue an apology, but I’m not sure that’s what’s needed, or would actually transform the country.”

Such an apology by a black president, Obama implied, would be tantamount to a wronged people simply apologizing to themselves.  This curiosity was enacted in Feb. ‘07, when both chambers of the Virginia State Assembly approved an apology for slavery—a resolution generated by legislators who were themselves descendants of slaves.

The U.S. House avoided this conflict of responsibility somewhat last July. It passed by voice vote a resolution apologizing for slavery that was spearheaded by Rep. Steve Cohen (D. Tenn.), described in the Washington Post as “a white Jew who represents a majority-black district in Memphis. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to join the Congressional Black caucus.”

In a move coinciding with Juneteenth this week,

Les Payne

June 15, 2009

Could NYPD behavior in the shooting of Officer Omar Edwards add up to the recklessness of a manslaughter case, or perhaps even second-degree murder?

After a white cop gunned down Edwards—in his home precinct—he was left bleeding unattended on 125th Street during the chilling aftermath, according to a cell-phone video by a bystander.

Even if the cop who shot Edwards, one Andrew Dunton, misidentified him, the critically wounded, housing patrol officer should have been recognized immediately on the ground by fellow officers. Edwards had signed out of the nearby 25th Precinct only minutes earlier.

How many of us have identified a colleague in street darkness and rendered aid to one struck down in night traffic? Or even a perfect stranger?

The cops caught on video were not so moved by human kindness. They idled and chased away witnesses as life ebbed from the body of the young, African-American man they had riddled with 9mm bullets. Whether thief or cop, the NYPD should have moved to preserve life.

They would have shown more concern for a downed Doberman, to say nothing of a wounded white cop.

This failure to assist Edwards constitutes endangerment after the fact;

June 10, 2009

“A “coup” has been staged in the capital city of a state government masquerading as a democracy. Yes, that’s as in “coup d’etat.”

The will of the voters of New York State has been overruled by a billionaire.

The revolt may well hold dangers for the governance of the nation, as Republicans in Washington—out of favor with voters these days—follow developments with envy and a keen eye.  

Albany went to bed with a Democratic majority in the Senate only to awaken Tuesday with the GOP in charge. There had been no election; no tanks in the streets. The “coup” did not come down out of the hills; it rather staggered in out of a Capital bar.

By last call, two Democrats, Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate, had been “talked into” switching their party. The tab was reportedly paid by billionaire Tom Golisano who handed the GOP a 32-vote majority and a new speaker, Espada, in fact, who would be second in line to the governor.

The two Democrats, by all accounts, are considered slimy even by the salamander standards of Albany. Flirting with the federal Mann Act, the last governor, Eliot Spitzer, for example, resigned over flings with high-priced prostitutes across state lines.

Party-switching Sen. Monserrate is under indictment for slashing a 20-stitch gash in his girlfriend’s face and blackening her eye. His comrade, Espada,

Les Payne

June 2, 2009

A key target of my last posting took strong exception to my analysis of how the Omar Edwards' tragedy might start the cleansing of the bad-blood between the NYPD and the black community in this “post racial” Obama era.

Along the way, Marquez Claxton, a cop himself, certified the very remedies objected to, and intensified the urgency of moving on them while the window is yet open.

With all the respect he afforded me, I am moved to rebut the defense of the “100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care” offered up by Claxton, a co-founder of the group.

In wake of the killing of Officer Edwards by a white cop, my modest proposals to the group asked simply that as NYPD insiders they should: sensitize white cops to behave with racial fairness; and that they increase the token presence of black officers on the force to a proportion of, say, 20 percent.

Officer Claxton flatly rejected my suggestions as he had when we publicly debated these matters at Abyssinian Baptist Church. His testiness this time, in fairness, grew out of my branding as “appalling cowardice” his group’s refusal to confront directly the entrenched racism within the department, a charge I’ll return to momentarily.  

The 20-percent African-American force is not a quota but a guesstimate in a city occasionally rattled by race-tinged police terror.

In a New York City some 35 percent black, a one-fifth portion suggests a fair, minimum distribution of jobs and influence within the department.

Currently, the token black presence has every man scrambling for himself. Naked ambition blinds such individuals to the need to

   in pursuit of carjack thief. (Keivom/News)

Les Payne

May 31, 2009

“The greatest fear I had as a police officer on duty was being shot by a white cop,” said a NYPD veteran over lunch in Harlem Friday. His fear had just been realized once again by the overnight shooting of Omar Edwards on 125th Street.

The 25 year old officer was chasing a thief caught rifling through his car when a plain-clothes sergeant and his partner arrived. “Even a black cop running with a gun,” said the veteran officer, “is all some of these hot-heads need to start shooting.” Such a sight moved Andrew Dunton to squat behind the door of his unmarked anti-crime car and squeeze off 6 shots.  

The rookie officer likely never realized that his stalkers were cops. A fatal bullet struck Edwards in the back, two others in the left side and arm. He died in his Police Academy T-shirt, his shield and identification in his pocket.

The white cop-shoots-fellow-black officer scenario is all too common. It recalls: the ’94 case of Desmond Robinson, shot in the back 4 times by Peter Del-Debbio; the ’98 incident of Sgt. Dexter Brown wounded in the back by Louis Lopez, a white Hispanic; and the ’06 incident, in which Alfredo Toro was shot dead in the Bronx.

It is impossible to eliminate race/ethnicity as the prime factor

Les Payne

May 22, 2009

Quarterback Michael Vick walked out of prison this week as the loneliest superstar on the planet. After 19 months with the hyenas of Leavenworth, the sacrificial lamb now faces 60 days with the wolves under house arrest.

“Should Vick be allowed to Play Again?” screamed one tabloid. “Ban Vick for Life,” said another. Others put it to a vote. If the thousands of my e-mail fans had their way the defrocked quarterback would twist forever in the wind like a gridiron Prometheus beyond the reach of grace and pardon.

The tragedy of Michael Vick, a peculiarly American tragedy, combines elements of race, privileged power and money, all played against a backdrop of fanaticism—denial--and injustice.

The case centered on Vick bankrolling relatives in a dog-fighting operation across Virginia state lines. Some 8 discarded pit-bulls were reportedly killed in this illegal sporting scheme. This abuse lathered up People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who joined the mob-chase. As if the feds were not enough, the professional dog fanatics, and amateurs elsewhere, wielded an influence on these legal matters that should have been disallowed.    

On Aug 27, 2007, the Atlanta Falcons’ player pled guilty to dog-fighting “conspiracy” before a hanging U.S. District judge, Henry Hudson. Judicial treatment of Vick as first offender, to say nothing of his snitching cousins and negligent attorneys, constitute a singular mockery of justice.

Even his well paid lawyer, one Billy Martin, should realize the futility of a

Hunter College's Department of Film and Media Studies presented the James Aronson Lifetime Achievement Award to Les Payne, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist for career achievement. Winners for investigative reporting included E. J. Graff, of Foreign Policy, Joseph Huff-Hannon, of The Indypendent, and Nick Turse, of the Nation.  

Kevin Buckley of Newsweek was also honored at the Thursday ceremony with an Aronson Award for reporting he did in Vietnam during the 1970s that had been largely buried until it was resurrected by Nick Turse.  

Danny Schechter of NewsDissector.org won the Aronson Blog Award for his muckraking reports on economic, political and social issues.

Ed Stein won the Aronson Award for Cartooning with a Conscience for his graphic commentary on the economy, torture and other critical issues of 2008.

The Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism (filmmedia.hunter.cuny.edu/aronson) have been presented since 1990 to journalists who measure business, government and social affairs against clear ideals of the common good. The awards are named in honor of James Aronson, the distinguished Hunter College professor of journalism who was editor from 1949 to 1967 of the crusading newsweekly The National Guardian. Aronson also worked on the staffs of the Boston Evening Transcript, New York Herald Tribune and New York Times.

“In their 19 years of existence,” said Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab, “the James Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism have consistently recognized and promoted journalism that keeps a well-trained and principled eye on the common good. That is a mission that Hunter, as a public institution with a diverse student body, tried to pursue throughout its research and teaching.”

“Journalism that conveys a clear idea of forces and decisions that lead to injustice has never been more needed than it is today," said Peter Parisi, coordinator of the award and an associate professor in Hunter’s Department of Film and Media Studies. “Yet too often journalists duck social justice issues, fearing their commitment will be called partisan or will draw political ‘flak’. This award is designed to embolden them to pursue their highest ideals.”

Payne was cited for his career as an editor, manager and columnist for Newsday. “Over the years, Payne has been variously recognized as the most influential African-American editor and columnist in the United States,” said Blanca Vasquez, during her introduction. “Murray Kempton described him as “a great editor because he is always his own man.” He trained generations of reporters to cover the basics and to dig deeper; his news staffs won every major award in journalism, including six Pulitzer Prizes.”

Les Payne

May 12, 2009

The flashing in my rear view mirror was unmistakable. The NYPD indeed meant me to pull over. Both cops got out, neither wore his service cap.

It was Saturday, 9:18 pm. I’d taken the last exit before the Midtown Tunnel. Stiffing Mayor Bloomberg for the $5 toll is a value-added pleasure of our trips to Harlem. The shorter of the uniformed duo swaggered to my rolled down window, dark hair straight back. His partner lagged on the passenger side, peering into the rear window.

“Could I see your license and registration,” said the short cop, showing no sign of “Courtesy, Professionalism, [or] Respect.”

“May I ask why you stopped me? I asked.

Rattled, if not rankled, the cop paused just long enough for my BS detector to kick in. Every skilled reporter conditions the mind to filter answers for mendacity. This BS detector is not fool-proof, of course,

         US Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) listens to remarks by US President Barack Obama (R) about Specter's announcement that he will switch

         to the Democratic Party before he runs for re-election in 2010, at the White House in Washington, April 29, 2009. Reuters Pictures

Les Payne

April 29, 2009

On the morning of the 100th day, Barack Obama went public with the senior senator from Pennsylvania who gave lie to the governor’s prediction that an African-American standard bearer would turn their state stone-cold Republican.

Instead, some 200,000 GOP state voters have switched to the Democrats, and Sen. Arlen Specter, a highly respected, 5-term lawmaker, dramatically joined them Tuesday in seeking another term. President Obama welcomed Specter not so much as a GOP defector but as a trophy of his envisioned omni-America where there are “not red states, or blue states, but the United States of America.

The 79-year old moderate said that his former party has moved too far to the right in valuing ideological purity over winning elections: “there should be an uprising.” Specter said he would not let “my 29-year record…be decided by that jury.”

The party-switch shocker is a rebuke to the prediction of Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) on the eve of the ’08 Democratic primary. The governor warned that white voters would

Les Payne

April 22, 2009

A college professor, with my connivance, submitted my work for a Pulitzer Prize this year. My former newspaper allegedly had the will but couldn’t spring for the $50 entry fee; too little cash, so many executive bonuses.

I didn’t win the Big Prize, of course. Nor did my 10 columns place or show.

The commentary judges did themselves proud for the first time in a great while by selecting Eugene Robinson. The savvy Washington Post columnist had a great year clocking the long march in tall grass that Barack Obama made against heavy odds en route to shucking his senator’s cloak for the mantle of the 44th U.S. President.

My columns on the ’08 campaign will be rescued from their purgatory and fluttered here in this space, forthwith. But first, let me share the letter in which my professor friend over-estimated me and—annoyed the Pulitzer judges.

To the judges:

For any newspaper columnist, 2008 was a gift.  But no opinion writer ripped the wrapping off this improbable present with as much gusto and grit as Les Payne of Newsday.

Each week, in a spare 600 or 700 words, Payne used his independent eye and X-Acto-knife way with the English language to chronicle the presidential campaign of “the possibility that is Barack Obama.”

With commentary always rooted in reporting that dug deep,

Les Payne

4/5/09

Rashad couldn’t risk watching the UConn games without some logo wear. An Avon specialty shop coughed up a $14, blue-and-white “Final Four” baseball cap just in time for the flat-screen, NCAA tip-off, Saturday.

The Big Dance is serious two-step action this year for the Hartford attorney, class of ’04, University of Connecticut School of Law. Both school teams waltzed into the Final Four.

This hadn’t happened since the men and women won NCAA championships in ’04.

Invoking lightning to strike twice again, Rashad pulled his rally cap tight to his ears. It all looked silly to his mother indoors. Only at halftime, with UConn down 2 points, did I risk telephoning my intense nephew.

“What am I to make of our teams’ chances?” I inquired of my family expert on UConn basketball. Not even Rashad’s rally cap could resuscitate the men's team,

Les Payne

March 20, 2009

Updated - March 23, 2009

As with the auto industry, America is in danger of losing its “national pastime” due to the outsourcing of jobs abroad and the importing of baseball players at home.

The best baseball is no longer played in the U.S. by Americans. This point was driven home in the World Baseball Classic Sunday night when Team USA lost to Japan, 9-4, in Los Angeles.

Japan, the reigning champs, could claim bragging rights but its culture eschews such vain displays. So does South Korea whose team won the baseball championship at the ‘08 Olympics - and faces Japan in the finals. Venezuela might also vie for the mantle but it would stir hemispheric tensions with Cuba where baseball is nothing short of a national passion.

By losing to Japan Wednesday, Cuba damaged the most storied record in global baseball. The island team had won 42 of its 50 international contests since 1952, finishing second 8 times and thus never settling even for third place in more than a half century.

As for the inventor of baseball, the U.S. took a Hollywood drubbing over the weekend in, well, Hollywood .

This globalization of baseball is all good. It's better for nations to pick their opponents off first-base than to bean them with roadside bombs. But, as Japan, Venezuela and Korea battle the U.S. for supremacy,

Les Payne

March 9, 2009

The reluctant role model was made an example for kids anyway -- a bad one. 

That would be Charles Barkley, the star Las Vegas gambler and former NBA player. The loose-lipped commentator crashed in a Phoenix jail for three days on a misdemeanor drunk-driving charge over the weekend. Sweating under the Arizona sun behind the barbwire of a “tent city” was not what Barkley had in mind when he endorsed one Joe Arpaio, the loony lawmaker who bills himself as “America’s toughest Sheriff.”

Alternately sheepish and defiant, the jock paced about in a sumo-sized, blue and red-trimmed sweat-suit, chatting with the media that have long grooved on his inane musings. Barkley accommodated by spinning the dial about Bernard Madoff, the battering Chris Brown dealt Rihanna, then over to his “good friend” President Obama. When reporters asked why wasn’t he wearing the zebra-striped uniforms as other inmates, the sports commentator for TNT was not amused.

“I know when [someone is] famous,” he shot back,

The front view of Sydenham Hospital, New York's first hospital to have a full

fledged interracial policy with six African American Trustees and twenty

African Americans on staff. (Walter Sanders, LIFE Magazine 1944)

Les Payne

March 03, 2009

With the devil scrolling down his dossier, Ed Koch admits to a single regret. It is a doozy committed at the height of his power as mayor of New York City.

The cagey 84-year old politician may outlive all of us, but, according to the New York Times, he has selected a burial plot, purchased a headstone and even had the marble engraved; it awaits only his departure date. “I’m not morbid,” he told the paper after recounting his “wonderful” life; pausing even to forgive those he felt had trespassed against him, such as former Gov. Mario Cuomo.

One deed, however, lay heavy on the mayor’s conscience.

During his first term, Koch faced a protesting Harlem concerned about losing Sydenham Hospital, a vital health center for indigent patients. With health profiles approaching those of Bangladesh, residents took to the streets to save the institution at 123rd Street from the scalpel at City hall.

Critics complained about care at Sydenham. And--despite having campaigned on the promise to keep it open--Koch saw a chance to save some money. Besides, he never cared much for back-talk from the black community; he took it personally.  

A key leader of the heated rallies was Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell, of Queens, a principled man of impeccable integrity. Squaring off on behalf of the afflicted against the powerful, Mitchell and the other black leaders challenged City Hall to do the right thing by its medically-underserved community.

Instead, Mayor Koch boldly shuttered the dwindling, once-699-bed hospital in early 1980, sending its indigent patients home and driving the doctors, eight interns and 32 nurses out onto the street.

As a freshman columnist, I could barely find words for the merciless act. Health options in Harlem were few. Black doctors, back then,

Les Payne

February 22, 2009

Upon discovering that my description of the lips of President George W. Bush as “simian” meant ape-like, a former New York mayor fired off a letter to the editor demanding my head.  

“What if a Newsday columnist had referred to the lips of the Revs. Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in that way,” Ed Koch wrote. “There would have been a flood of complaints, pickets…cancellations of subscriptions. Rightly so.”

Faced with another example of Mayor Koch’s misplaced concern, I wrote a second column four years ago explaining racial stereotypes to him and others. A “simian” reference to Jackson and Sharpton, I agreed, may well constitute a provocation. However, this same word applied to a white, Anglo Saxon male such as Bush is not a racial stereotype, but a simple adjective. It would be as if the ears of President Obama, say, were described as “owlish,” or even “elephantine.”

With tempers raging over the recent New York Post cartoon, my ’05 primer on such offenses might shed some light.

Reasonable observers have concluded that the chimpanzee described as the “someone” who wrote the stimulus package targets President Barack Obama, at the exclusion of all others. Every African American I know was sickened by the image and none, as Post editors suggest, waited for a signal from Rev. Al Sharpton.

It is the habit of this media-savvy, protest impresario to pick up the rage of his community and take it to the streets. Sharpton has the unfortunate history of playing off those he defends against those he attacks—and sometimes for a fee. As a result, the big-voiced preacher tends to discredit causes for which he marches, even as he highlights genuine abuses that might otherwise get downplayed.

“Shame on you for dodging the real issue,” said singer John Legend in a letter to the editor describing the Post cartoon as “blatantly racist and offensive…This is not about Rev. Sharpton.”

What then is the root of the offending Post cartoon?

Les Payne

February 14, 2009

I come forth humbly now, as Alex Rodriguez did last week, to declare that where once I was blind--I now see the light.

In my case, it was about sports reporting. Years ago, as an aggressive newspaper editor, I diverted several young sportswriters into political reporting on the advice that they should put away childish things.

As with poetry, I considered sports reporting a sign of arrested development. The field was more clouded back then. Reporters rooted rather openly for the home teams they covered, objectively, of course. They routinely accepted gifts as not so subtle incentives to slant stories. They got free tickets; drank the team owners’ brandy, top-shelf stuff, and smoked his expensive cigars.

With vested interest in the outcome, sportswriters tended not to report the facts so much as to waylay them. Accordingly, when things didn’t go their way, which is to say, they lost the side bets, fist fights in the press box were not unknown as spats on the road had to be taken to a higher court.

The looms of the hometown papers spun yarns of splendiferous colors about local Spartans giving their all on the playing fields. But here, I risk spinning a yarn of my own.

The simple fact is that I most likely opposed young talent entering sports reporting because it was not the field I had chosen to make my stand. Over-zealousness, despite my love of sports, drove me to dismiss coverage of these diversions as unworthy of the journalist’s eye.

I was wrong.

Doing Nothing Is Not An Option

Les Payne

February 10, 2009

The community organizer returned to the hard-pressed people of Elkhart this week, speaking over the heads of Congress as U.S. President much as he had spoken over the heads of his more seasoned opponents as a first-term senator on the campaign trail.  

As the winner in Indiana this time, President Barack Obama practiced the victory stride he later broke out with in earnest at his first prime-time press conference. Challenging a negotiating Congress over his slimmed-down economic “recovery plan,” the President so deft at extending his hand showed that he could also clench his fist.

“What I won't do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place,” he told the nation, “because those theories have been tested, and they have failed. And that's what part of the election in November was all about.”

Less theoretical later on, and with harder eyes, the president scolded Republicans attacking his fiscal responsibility. “It's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.”   

Extending the olive branch is not working with GOP members of Congress so the President hinted gently but unmistakably at the talons he keeps largely out of sight.  

Notes on the Inauguration of President Barack H. Obama from the National Mall

President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts to become the 44th

President of the United States on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Les Payne

January 25, 2009

The 12th Street crowd I waded into on Inauguration Day was as joyous as a 21-degree chill allows at 7:15 in the morning. Within two hours our phalanx of every stripe and hue, omni-Americans as Albert Murray might say, choked back three blocks to H Street.

Maneuvering around a water main break, our huddled masses without tickets inched determinedly along the side streets of the Capital. At 10:30 a.m., we dog-legged up a hill past a tight column of blue, port-a-potty toilets and onto the western end of the National Mall, nearly two miles from the spot where the President-elect would swear his oath on the Abraham Lincoln Bible.

Decades earlier, I had tarried on these exact grounds between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The descendants of slaves were petitioning for their rights from a descendant of indentured servants--the nation’s first Irish Catholic President. I had come down on the train from Hartford as a student to bear witness for the expansion of “democracy” in this vainglorious republic.  

The ’63 March got into the books on the strength of the “I Have a Dream” speech by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The following year, in a BBC interview, the civil rights leader predicted that the nation would elect a Negro president by 1988. One of his lieutenants took a stab at the long odds,

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Les Payne's Too-Quiet Departure

Comment

By Peter Eisner

January 6, 2009

With scant warning and no praise, the management of Newsday last week cast off the column by Les Payne from its opinion pages after a twenty-eight-year run. Undoubtedly, the column's disappearance is mixed in with a collapse of the news business in general and the budget cuts faced by Newsday and most of its peers. Yet I am driven to provide some context in this special case about a man whose vision guided Newsday's journalistic and moral compass. Les Payne deserves a far better sendoff.

Payne stepped back from his day-to-day duties at Newsday in 2006 after more than three decades, having served as associate editor, local and national reporter and foreign correspondent. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for detailing the heroin trail from Turkey to the United States and had one snatched away after being chosen to win for his reporting from Soweto at the height of South African apartheid. He was national editor, assistant managing editor for foreign and national news, and, at various times on his watch, he was in charge--often concurrently--of health and science coverage, New York City, Washington, politics, foreign reporting and investigations at Newsday, when the newspaper--now eviscerated by rounds of cutbacks and mismanagement--was one of the great newspapers in the country. Reporters under his purview won six Pulitzers and all the other top awards in journalism.

He was the conscience and unacknowledged leader of the Newsday that was, and some of us protested loudly when a higher-up passed over Les and chose someone else as managing editor a number of years back; in terms of leadership, journalist skills, mentoring, excellence and savvy, he should have been the only choice.

A founder and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, Payne was once described as the best and most influential African-American editor and columnist in the United States. True enough, but the statement unduly confines the scope of his influence. He continues to set an example by speaking out against racism and injustice everywhere, and above all he stands for the highest goals, values and aspirations of American journalism.

Murray Kempton once described Payne to Jack Newfield, of the Village Voice, this way: