Les Payne

November 10, 2010

Sitting across the table from President Barack Obama, I pondered what the presidency was like for the two Roosevelt’s back when Americans respected the Office even if they despised the Chief Executive.

The thought occurred in the Roosevelt Room recently where 10 columnists from the Monroe Trotter Group were hosted in this chamber named for the two presidents that were fifth-cousins. The windowless conference space across from the Oval Office of the White House has a false skylight and is dominated by an oblong table flanked by portraits of the two Roosevelt’s.

"Teddy" gazes from his galloping steed in a Tade Styka oil painting hanging over the mantel on the east wall.

Lest this equestrian be taken simply as the "Rough Rider," his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever awarded to an American, is displayed with a ribbon in a case on the north wall. This 26th president who made it to Mt. Rushmore was credited with ending the Russo-Japanese War after hosting a sit-down between diplomats of the two nations at his Long Island estate that led to the Portsmouth Treaty. 

Cousin Franklin Delano was the lesser athlete and his portrait painter arrayed him at his desk and cleverly disguises the crippling effect of FDR’s debilitating disease. Both ruling-class politicians were Anglican, though cousin "Teddy’s" Episcopalianism was tainted somewhat by his practice of the Dutch Reform religion that, if nothing else, enhanced his frontier image.

Had Gutzon Borglum started blasting away at that South Dakota mountain a few decades later, it is arguable that instead of Teddy, FDR might have made it upon Mt. Rushmore for his deft handling of the Great Depression and the cataclysmic events of WWII.

President Obama, of course, has inherited a modern version of this double plague: a great economic collapse along with two foreign wars. And he must await the judgment of history under quite different circumstances of fear and loathing.

Peering warily at our group of newspaper columnists recently, this 44th U.S. President, unlike the two Roosevelt’s, displayed a welcomed lack of the Anglican taint as well as of the white, so-called blue-blood lines. This latter blessing has not stood Obama in good stead with white Americans, chiefly the elderly, who, despite John McCain’s ’08 promise to continue the George Bush Death March, voted overwhelmingly at 55-43 percent to reject the one hope for avoiding a catastrophe—the first African-American president. And they continue now at the same ....

President Barack Obama signs the Fair Sentencing Act in the Oval Office, Aug. 3, 2010. Joining the President are, from left, Gil Kerlikowske,

Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.,

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, of Ill., Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas,

and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Les Payne

August 5, 2010

When signing into law that bill reducing disparity in penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses, President Barack Obama narrowed the “racial” gap in drug sentencing Tuesday by some 82 percent. Yet, he did not close it.

Civil rights leaders struggling mightily for parity under this unjust federal policy filling the prisons overwhelmingly with blacks are premature in celebrating the bill as a total victory. While an improvement, this new legislation now punishes crack cocaine offenders—that cops racially target among black users and sellers in the first instance—by a ratio of 18:1, as compared with those abusing powder cocaine.     

On the presidential level, this achievement, as with the health care bill, is another example of Obama surpassing Bill Clinton’s failed efforts, this time in the crucial, criminal-justice area affecting mainly African-Americans. As such, unlike with the health care bill affecting all Americans, the first black president, it was duly noted, made absolutely no public comment during the bill signing.

The savvy political observer understands Obama’s public reticence on such controversial matters given white denial about racism. However, it allows his critics, black and white, to down-play this break-through and continue harping about his alleged lack of sensitivity, especially in wake of the Shirley Sherrod affair.

In a rare show of bi-partisanship, the Fair Sentencing Act was passed by a Congress that the president and his attorney general managed at least to tilt toward fair sentencing. The bill revokes a five-year mandatory sentence for first offenders; and, instead of five grams of crack drawing the same mandatory sentence as 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the new minimum for rock has been set at 28 grams.

The Draconian 100:1 ratio of crack to powder has thus been reduced to a less cruel but still unjust bias of 18:1. Once again, the promise of equal justice remains evasive under the peculiar legislative-judicial system that moves like a glacier when it comes to dispensing parity between white and black citizens.

Race crept into this drug equation at the very inception of the disparate sentencing law in 1986, when, during the drug scourge, lawmakers prosecuted crack cases as....

Les Payne

July 20, 2010

.0005!

That’s the batting average of the mayor and his police commissioner patrolling New York City the week George Steinbrenner died. The Yankees owner would have fired them both a thousand times over for weak hitting.

New Yorkers, to their credit, tried to fire their mayor by twice voting to limit his terms. He overrode this popular will, however with the rubberstamp consent of the City Council and continues to reign as Papa Doc Bloomberg, mayor, perhaps, for life.

As for the NYPD batting average, the New York Times reported the city’s shameful performance in an eight-block stretch of Brooklyn over a four-year period. The controversial “Stop, Question, Frisk” policy targets this predominantly black Brownsville area “at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the city.”

The city-wide program, according to the Times, is “most urgently meant to get guns off the streets.” Yet, “the arrest rate is less than one percent…in the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.” The Times’ estimate of “less than 1 percent” understates the statistical rate of gun detection by a factor of more than a thousand!

Recovering a single gun in Brownsville requires the NYPD to stop, question and frisk an astounding 2,080 persons—often provoking and harassing such citizens and occasionally shooting them dead in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the gun discovery rate of .0005 could likely be matched were cops randomly to frisk preachers, rabbis and Catholic priests, to say nothing of college deans, hacks, or Wall Street brokers.

So why in a supposedly open society promising all residents civil liberties are Bloomberg and Commissioner 

Raymond Kelly violating the rights of innocent citizens to move freely about?...

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....