GETTY IMAGES

Les Payne

July 15, 2010

George Steinbrenner was saluted in death by a “recovering” drug addict, one Rush Limbaugh, as a “cracker” who made black players rich while firing “a bunch of white guys as managers left and right.”

The Limbaugh eulogy seems a sure sign that the illicit OxyContin addiction that likely made him deaf has clearly numbed him to shame. The penchant for lying, however, is a preexisting condition.

Gloating inaccuracies about the departed owner of the New York Yankees moved me to violate one of my rules of commentary: never kick a dog even when he’s up, especially a mangy one frothing at the mouth.

Unfortunately, Limbaugh’s untimely comment deserves attention this time because the base sentiment is deeply held by millions of Americans who swoon on every word that falleth from the Talkmeister’s lips.  

First off, Limbaugh was born in Missouri and should know that, unlike himself, Ohio-born Steinbrenner—who owned the “Yankees” for crying out loud—is not technically a “cracker.” In terms of white-racist consciousness, again, it is Limbaugh, not Steinbrenner, who tops the leader-board.

As for black players, the Yankees owner did not make them millionaires. Steinbrenner earned his billions, and his teams won 7 World championships along the way, by paying the going rate for “free agents.” And if anyone, along with the players’ marketable skills, made this value assessment a reality—it was....

                                                                                                                                                                           GETTY IMAGES

As posted on TheRoot.com

Les Payne

July 12, 2010

As the dirt settles on Robert Byrd's grave, let us reflect on the wisdom of a former U.S. president offering a post-mortem alibi for the man who began his public service as the Exalted Cyclops of the murderous Ku Klux Klan.

''They mention that he once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?'' Clinton said at Byrd's funeral on July 2. ''I'll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians.''

Byrd was hardly just "trying to get elected.'' First off, he recruited dozens of terrorists for the Klan over a rather lengthy span in his 20s and into his 30s. Furthermore, one did not attain the key ranks of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in this lynching bee with a mere ''fleeting association.''

Notwithstanding the racism of Byrd's era, Clinton is quite inaccurate in suggesting here that getting elected required a hooded apprenticeship in a cow pasture under a bedtick. Sympathizing with the Klan may well have been de rigueur for Southern politicians on the make; however, few actually took up shotgun and fagot with the zealotry of Robert Byrd, who recruited some 150 friends and associates into his klavern in the early '40s.

Was this wrong? Bill Clinton is not quite sure. ''And maybe he did something wrong,'' the former president hedged during his eulogy. It depends, I suppose, on what your definition of ....

President Barack Obama meets with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, aboard

Air Force One in Copenhagen, Denmark on Oct. 2, 2009

Les Payne featured on

The Caldwell Chronicles with Earl Caldwell

as broadcast on WBAI 99.5 FM in N.Y.C.

Earl Caldwell and Les Payne have a discussion about journalism, the military and President Barack Obama's replacing Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, with General David Petraeus.

                                                                                                                                                               Photographs by Joan Marcus

Les Payne

June 22, 2010

The performance of Denzel Washington is so insightful in August Wilson’s bitingly authentic play about black life that it is downright surprising, though quite fitting, that the actor won a Broadway “Tony.”

Authenticity usually gets the black artist nowhere with top awards judges soaked in what passes for white culture. Such shameless, self-absorption leaves little room for fair judgment especially of those considered outsiders. Such actors, starting with Hattie McDaniel, Oscar winner for "Gone With the Wind” and running with few exceptions down through Halle Berry and “Precious” Mo’Nique; the strong black actor is expected to play the demeaned character then crawl into the judgment hall hopefully to get rewarded.  

Denzel Washington was skipped over, accordingly, for his authentic portrayal of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, a twice-convicted boxer so convinced of his innocence that he bedazzled everyone who listened. Instead of rewarding that brilliant interpretation of a black man in full, Hollywood gave its “Training Day” Oscar to Denzel for casually playing the most corrupt cop in Los Angeles as a despicable black detective; so much for true-life in the LAPD.

In the current Broadway run of “Fences,” Denzel returns to his “first love” in a role made famous by one of his stage heroes. Nonetheless, he probes a rich vein of Wilson’s ’85 Pulitzer Prize winning work that was largely overlooked or incompletely explored by the great James Earl Jones in the original production. (Tip of the hat to the Tony’s for also selecting “Fences” as this year’s “Best Revival.”)

In the ‘80’s version, the roar-voice power of James Earl Jones amplified the athletic drive of the main character at the expense of his other prowess, leaving Troy Maxson as a washed-up baseball player, chiefly. Troy was hell-bent on getting back up at the plate and taking his swing at life and at death. Leaving little room for his stage wife to breathe air into her character, Jones played the ex-con failing at reforming his life with a wife and son in a performance dominated by the baseball aspects of the play.

However, in the current version, when Denzel’s Troy copped to messing around with another woman, his wife....

Les Payne

June 15, 2010

At about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 16th, South Africa should silence the raucous fan-noise at the World Cup and pay homage to the blood-stained shroud of Hector Pietersen.

On the morning of that day of protest 34 years ago, as Soweto students massed in an open field—an agitated policeman fired a single shot that sent 13-year old Pieterson sprawling in his own blood. He was in the book of martyrs before he hit the ground.

As his buddy in overalls went screaming down the field with Pieterson’s body, the children of Soweto had marked the point of no return for apartheid. Spearheaded by the Boers, the racist white minority had locked away Nelson Mandela and his comrades for a dozen years; and thus they felt the black majority could be suppressed for a thousand years.

But on June 16th, some 20,000 unarmed students stepped forth to challenge the Europeans who stole their land and looted its mineral wealth. Initially, they protested the use of the Boers’ narrow, Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. The killing of Pieterson ignited the Soweto Uprising that brought in adults and targeted the entire superstructure of racist apartheid.

The Boers exacted a terrible toll in blood as police gunned down hundreds of unarmed African men, women and children who dared rise up against tyranny and barbarism. Blood diamonds, minerals and Krugerrands bought needed U.S. technology and President Reagan—the worst Chief Executive in modern times—offered the racist regime complete White House support under a policy of “constructive engagement.”

Heroic American students of that era ...

Artur Davis - Eric Schultz / The Huntsville Times

Les Payne

June 7, 2010

When pondering the recent defeat of Artur Davis, I puzzle not so much over the politics of my home-state, as over the compromise of this Democrat vying to become the first black governor of Alabama.

Didn’t Davis learn anything from Barack Obama; or Harvard, even? What about Percy Sutton?

In addition to showing black candidates how to win, generally, Obama blazed a specific, Democratic trail for his fellow Harvard alum to win on in Alabama. Blacks stampeding to the polls constituted 51- percent of the ’08 primary voters when Obama smashed Hillary Clinton there.

With the nomination his for the running, Davis turned his back on this base constituency and spit over his shoulder into their eyes. Ignoring even his fellow black legislators, the four-term congressman refused to attend their political functions while chasing longingly after every such white gathering not burning a cross in a cornfield at midnight.

And in a bold, public turning of his coat, Rep. Davis tauntingly voted against Obama’s national health care bill. Already local, black politicians had smelled enough. The Davis stench drove Birmingham’s first black mayor, Richard Arrington, for example, to endorse ....

         Lt. Les Payne accepts "Best Battery" honors from Ft. Bliss Commanding General, on post parade field. U.S. Army Photograph 6 Oct. 1965

Les Payne

May 29, 2010

Vietnam has been dragged back into the news this Memorial Day weekend not as foreign policy but as a bragging point for a politician on the make who back when it was time to put up—he shut up.

As a Vietnam veteran, I find Richard Blumenthal amusing.

Running for a senate seat in Connecticut, he has been exposed as claiming falsely that he served in Vietnam. Instead, as the New York Times revealed, young Richard hid out in the National Guard after exhausting all non-uniform means to duck the military call up of able-bodied men.

Draft avoidance was common, back then, among patriots immune to shame and irony. These middle-class heroes got the jobs and a career leg up on their brethren who leaped to the cannon roar. Two such opportunists became two-term, U.S. Presidents, one selecting as his number-two, one Cheney, a "hero" who avoided the military draft five times.

Blumenthal’s public boast about Vietnam should have been a tip-off; most veterans hold their tongue about involvement in this particular war.

Thus, I was caught off guard, when at the recent funeral of Lena Horne; a fellow Vietnam veteran asked me if I had been embittered about my battlefield experience. Neither of us had talked much about it over the years.

Perhaps, it was the moving tribute paid to Lena by the octogenarian members of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen that brought it all back. Ms. Horne had sung for the airmen during WWII and became their sepia pin-up girl.

I told my fellow veteran on the steps of St. Ignatius Cathedral that....

United States Senate candidate Rand Paul, at a press conference in Frankfort, Kentucky. Rand Paul portrait by

Gage Skidmore 12/30/09

Les Payne

May 24, 2010

Far too much is being made of Rand Paul; and at the expense of the greater threat to civil liberties that African-Americans won on paper only during the mid-1960’s.

Granted, the Republican senate nominee from Kentucky would likely vote to roll back the ‘64 legislation that allowed blacks to eat and drink at private restaurants open to the public. And the racist backwardness of nominee Paul should be avoided at all costs--and him along with it.

However, the bedeviling detail in the pursuit of Rand Paul has the media chase making him something of a scapegoat. Driving out this straight-talking libertarian would not get at the more organized, entrenched, white-racist forces bent on “retaking our country” with stealth.

The little-or-no-government Libertarian Party has long enjoyed a kook license to crack its pots in obscurity. It has been dragged out into the light of day now, as Rand Paul’s distaste for federal action--even against state-sanctioned racism--has intersected with the Tea-Party’s drive to make the first black U.S. president the last.

Unable, or unwilling, to expose the Tea Baggers’ racism by euphemisms, the corporate media could not ignore the blunt spoken bigotry of Rand Paul the libertarian.

Even here, it took the counter-cultured Rachel Maddow, of the somewhat irregular MSNBC, to nail Paul with his own words Wednesday night. By the weekend, much of corporate media, including the New York Times, had confirmed in the Tea Party what had been exposed under the smirk and glower of Rachel Maddow.

This racial defect clearly had been a key, motivating factor for...

A panel of experts on Ethiopian visual arts will discuss aspects of the cultural, political, social, and economic forces that have influenced its people and the evolution of their unique art.

Noted scholar, Achamyeleh Debela, an artist himself with a brilliant international reputation, will participate, along with professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU, and Bill Karg, a local art dealer. Filmmaker Haile Gerima, whose latest work, “Teza, is currently running in selected theaters, has also been invited.

An exhibit of some 60 ETHIOPIAN paintings from Addis Ababa highlights the two-day event that is open to the public all day Saturday.     

         TIME:     Saturday, May 8, 1pm-2:30pm

         PLACE:   Theater, Paley Center, 25 West 52^nd Street,

                                          Manhattan.

                                         Moderator: Les Payne

Panelists:  Achamyeleh Debela, PhD, N.C. Central University, Dept. of Art

                     Professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU

                     Bill Karg, Contemporary African Art Gallery, NYC 

Les Payne

April 19, 2010

The “overwhelming majority of supporters” of the Tea Party reveal themselves as likely racist, according to data in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

This point was not made in the Times headlines saluting the supporters as simply “wealthier and more educated” than the general public. Nor did the story draw such a conclusion. However, the “detailed look at the profiles and attitudes” of the tea baggers went beyond anecdotal musings to indicate that their total dismissal of the 44th U.S. President has less to do with policy than with his race.

Nailing this broad-based sentiment among whites in deep denial about race is never easy. However, poll questions have been designed to detect a prevalence of racism among respondents.

Newsday once subjected white Long Islanders to the Gallup poll consisting of the control question: Do you feel blacks are better athletes? It was paired with four hardcore queries about false notions of blacks’ assumed values, intelligence, attitudes and work ethics. A “yes” on the control question coupled with acceptance of a hardcore negative stereotype indicated that the respondent housed strong “racist” tendencies.

The Gallup poll revealed that some 67-percent of whites in Nassau and Suffolk county were clearly “racist,” a result that shocked Newsday’s top editors. They declined to take the test themselves.

A recent Tea Party rally at the state office building in Suffolk County featured confederate flags on the Island built up after WWII as a series of segregated, white suburban townships. Another reminder of racial attitudes on Long Island showed up in the recent Times/CBS poll.

Question #47 put to the tea-baggers about President Obama is a variation of the standard poll query used to test white respondents for racism:

“Do you think Barack Obama shares the values most Americans try to live by, or doesn’t?”

Some 75 percent of the Tea Party supporters--with little to go on other than that Obama is black--slammed the duly-elected U.S. President as living by a different....

Les Payne

April 11, 2010

When the editor of Newsday phoned to say that I had not won the international Pulitzer Prize for my reporting from South Africa, I snubbed it off until he explained that the ’78 “selection committee” had indeed selected me as the winner.

Thus, I had lost the Pulitzer Prize.

The Advisory Board, headed by the President of Columbia University—which had been the target of determined anti-apartheid student demonstrations--gave no reason for taking away my Pulitzer for reporting on the Soweto uprising. Not surprisingly, this ruling clique gave it to the New York Times, a heavy contributor to the Pulitzer operation in terms both of finance and manpower. (The day may yet arrive when the Times get hauled in under the RICO statute for acting in concert with the Pulitzer Board.)

I recovered sufficiently to tell Editor Tony Insolia on the phone that my Rhodesia-Zimbabwe series, which Newsday had just published in ’78, was even stronger than the 11-part South Africa one. The Board, I said, would get a shot at correcting its error the following year.

Meanwhile, the Pulitzer selection committee, led by Chairman William E. Chilton, III, got angry at being over-ruled and went public—about my lost Pulitzer. It was by no means the first over-turn, there had been others that year; however, Chilton III was the first panelist to dare ignite a scandal over the issue.

The outcry of the International panel held that, as with other committees, the four editors drawn from across the country had been led to believe that they were indeed judging the 60 foreign entries to select a winner. They laid the deception at the feet of the Pulitzer Board.

Newsday loosed its intrepid media specialist onto the scandal and gained access to the Pulitzer Archives. The resulting series of Tom Collins’ reporting didn’t relieve me of my notions about the corrupt practices of the Board and the New York Times. It did, however, inspire certain reforms.

What I did not discover until recently was that my judgment to the editor about the strength of my Zimbabwe series was...

President Barack Obama signs landmark health care legislation into law Tuesday, March 23. White House Photo, Pete Souza, 3/23/10

Les Payne

March 24, 2010

The president who campaigns with the big speech used 22 pens Tuesday in signing the historic health care bill that proved he can govern with the outreach as well as the arm twist.

Applying torque at the last minute to reluctant members of his own party, President Obama eclipsed the 216 House votes needed to sign into law what some call the most sweeping health overhaul since Medicare. The controversy became reality without a single GOP vote, and this after Obama exhausted all means to reason with the party—even trekking in January to the caves of the House Republicans' retreat in Maryland.    

Some have long considered Obama’s outreach to the GOP a fool’s errand; but it has now exposed the opposition party as foregoing all claims to common decency. Opting out of the etiquette of patriotism, the Republicans, not unlike Fox interviewer Bret Baier, flatly refuse to extend the minimum courtesies traditionally accorded Obama’s 43 predecessors to the office of the presidency.

It remains to be seen what Obama will make of this total rejection by the GOP; but his dramatic success with health care seems to have narrowed the gap with the progressive wing of his own party. Some Democrats were brought around with promises. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the reluctant radical with no known, sell-out price, had to be walked to the precipice and made to peer over into the abyss.

The Ohio radical had declared on TV his resolute opposition to the health bill with no “public option.” Normally, under such conditions, this cold-eyed “Great Dissenter” with the concrete legs stays put. Opposing the previous House bill with 76 progressives, for example, Kucinich ended up as the last radical voting “no.”  

Last week the dissenting Kucinich was visited by President Obama who staged public rallies in Ohio and called out his name from the podium. It was not so much a salute as the president speaking over the congressman’s head to get constituents to put a bug in Kucinich’s ear. Ohioans didn’t mince words. Hedging his bets, Obama took Kucinich for a ride on Air Force One.

In the White House parlance, this is called....

March 10, 2010

As I ran down the steps my heels slipped, whipping my legs skyward with such force that the left knee snapped like a twig. There was no doubt about the trauma the surgeon later compared to a hand grenade exploding inside the muscle and tendon.

Cold and helpless on the fifth step, I backed into the brownstone on my haunches and started the cover-up. Accepting only sympathy and an ice-pack, I rushed my wife off to work. I didn’t dare look at the knee speaking to me in throbs.

“I got this;” I muttered, faithful to race and gender. What’s the fun of being a black man if you can’t wax stupid about your health issues? The best advice I ever ignored as an editor came from Derrick Jackson, a vegan reporter who runs marathons. “We black men,” he cautioned, “have got to start taking better care of ourselves.” Sure.

Sneaking a peak at the wounded knee, I phoned two buddies about the bunching not the ache. Both journalists said that time was "wasting". Bill Rhoden, an ex-athlete who covers major league sports and head-knockings, said that muscle tears were not known to heal themselves, even under ice. My daughter, Tamara, under advice of my doctor, rushed me to the emergency room of Columbia- Presbyterian Hospital.

I chatted up the witty, examining physician, who skated non-emergency procedure and ordered....

STILL BILL, directed by Damani Baker and Alex Vlack, is an intimate portrait of Bill Withers, the artist behind the classics “Ain’t No

Sunshine,” “Lean On Me,” “Lovely Day” and “Just the Two of Us.” Through archival and new concert footage and interviews with music

greats, his family and closest friends, the film reveals the man behind the music.

Les Payne

February 11, 2010 

He is an American original, Bill Withers. The voice is as clear as the wind and just as carefree. Withers has that gift from the gods so overlooked in popular song-writers: a well-tuned ear.

Ringtones of his “Lovely Day” summon generation X to their cell-phones. Not bad for a singer/songwriter who walked away from the performing stage 25 years ago. He put words into songs that lasted and the unabashed senior citizen speaks even now in a timeless vernacular.

“I got tired of being somewhere else so I went home,” Withers said the other day of his month-long stay in Zaire back in 1974, when heavyweight Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman for the world boxing title. Such a line, and this one never made it into a song, is born of a well-tuned ear listening to common speech.      

Upon rushing on-stage to perform at the Apollo, Chuck Berry once found himself duck-walking in his lounging slippers instead of his patent leather shoes, which he left behind the curtains. His ear picked up a Harlem fan on the front row yelling: “You need you some shoes, Chuck!”

This ear of the popular song-writer usually comes with a conscience. This mysterious work of the musician is not that of the preacher who harasses, but that of the Recording Angel who observes and takes note. Chuck Berry was so ordained; as was Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters and Paul McCartney writing Eleanor Rigby.

This consciousness guided Bill Withers during his gig at the “Rumble in the Jungle,” as Ali tagged the championship bout in what is now the Congo . “I had never been in a country where there was a dictator,” the singer/songwriter told Tavis Smiley on a recent show, “a place where there was such a disparity in wealth.” “A few people had all the money” and the “very opulent lifestyle” of President Mobutu unnerved the black southerner who had lived through the struggle for equality in America .

“Man this guy gives me the creeps,” he said of the brutal dictator. “Morally, I didn’t feel comfortable with [Mobutu],” hosting the world’s top writers and entertainers at his jungle Gomorrah. As for the Ali-Foreman fight, Withers reduced it to “two big guys going to fight each other [in the middle of the night]…and I could find that in some bar [back home].

“I split,” he said during a New York screening of a film about his life entitled “Still Bill.” “I didn’t stay for the fight.”

The documentary reveals a remarkable American singer/songwriter who after a late start at age 32 walked away from public, stage stardom at age 45. He wrote such classic tunes as “Lean on Me"; "Lovely Day"; "Ain’t No Sunshine"; "Use Me"; "Just the Two of Us", and scores of lesser tunes remembered for the feelings they stir and the story they tell.

Upon talking with a soldier who’d lost an arm in battle, Withers wrote....

President Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber

 of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 27, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Les Payne

February 4, 2009

Staring down Conservatives of both branches of government last week, President Obama confronted the steel teeth of powerful forces that, at bottom, consider him something of a squatter in the Oval Office that for 232 years had been reserved for white men only.

The Republicans at that House Caucus retreat in Baltimore, and the Supreme Court on the front row at the State of the Union Address gazed upon the first black president as if he had destabilized the group’s psyche about their entitlements. Obama’s ensuing call for a bi-partisan approach to solving the catastrophic problems facing the nation fell on the icy wasteland that is the heart of this brazen opposition.

It should be clear even to President Obama by now that this entrenched, government opposition—who know they’re backed by the 55-percent, white McCain-Palin majority that voted against him—will settle for nothing less than the kow-tow, or failing that, denying Obama re-election in hopes of reclaiming what they misguidedly consider their entitlement by dint of birthright.

This Black History Month calls for a frank assessment not simply of the challenges the first African-American president faces, but also an examination of the larger possibilities for those who dared elect him. Can they create a true Omni-America where for the first time democracy can be made to ensure “liberty and justice for all?”

There is a strong tendency to deny race as a key factor in such high matters of government; however...

                                                                                                                                                                    Public Domain/Whitehouse.gov

Les Payne

January 22, 2010

A year to the day after President Obama was sworn in on that Lincoln Bible, the GOP elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts to step up its campaign, as G. K. Chesterton once said of Conservatives, to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

As Republicans over-hype their Brown decision, the filibuster-proof-breaking, 41st GOP senator has dimmed the hopes of Democrats counting on the clout of a 60-vote majority to correct such disasters of the Bush years as health care. Politics these days, save under dictatorships and in New York City, depends not on the bellow of the “strong man” but the grating interplay of opposing forces duly elected.

Thus, despite Americans’ support for health reform and even the “public option,” the minority GOP is hell-bent on obstructing change and freezing the status quo. And their hearts are gladdened this week by the D.C. arrival of the nude, male model from the Bay State.

This lone cock-robin from Massachusetts is said to bring not only spring but also summer and fall. No sooner had Brown’s lame opponent conceded prematurely in Boston, for example, than a few observers were concluding that, some 365 days into his first term, President Obama is a “lame Duck.”

The Democrats have lost their super-edge in the Senate, period. They have not lost their majority—and if their tactical skills hold, they likely will not lose the mid-term elections. All of this, of course, will be misread by the media as they impress their bosses and tilt public opinion to the delight of the Rush-McCain-Palin wing of the GOP.

Flapping his short arms like a bull penguin, Sen. McCain hasn’t been this exuberant since...