Ralph McGill Would Never Defend “Stand Your Ground”

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

Photographer: Jon Sullivan. Copyright: Public domain image, not copyrighted, no rights reserved, royalty free stock photo.

“Scales of Justice” by Jon Sullivan, photographer. Copyright: Public domain image, not copyrighted, no rights reserved, royalty free stock photo. Available from Public-Domain-Image.com

By Leslye Joy Allen

Historian, Educator, Theatre and Jazz Advocate, Doctoral Student

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the late Ralph McGill (1898-1969), he was a White journalist and publisher of the old Atlanta Constitution (now the Atlanta Journal Constitution). He was also a well-known liberal who wrote about racial discrimination in society at large and within the criminal justice system. He did this long before the Civil Rights Movement reached its apogee in the 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. mentioned McGill in his eloquent “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” King wrote that McGill and some other White journalists, “have written about our struggle in eloquent, prophetic and understanding terms.” Indeed, McGill was a man who watched, learned, and evolved into one of the most progressive voices in the American South and the nation when it came to race relations, civil rights, and the penal system. With that said, it is important for you to understand that I did not learn about Ralph McGill from a newspaper or a book, but rather from my schoolteacher mother.

Mama remembered that he emphasized that when a Black person killed another Black person they typically received very light jail or prison sentences—that is, if they received any jail time at all. It was just the opposite if they had killed a White person. He noted that because of this failure to properly punish Black people who killed other Black people, the judicial system literally encouraged those individuals to carry out their anger to its fullest possible extreme. He accused the judicial system of encouraging Black folks to kill each other. Mama said that there was an unsettling joke going around in Atlanta during the 1940s that said: if you were a Black man that killed another Black man you would be out of jail in time to go to your victim’s funeral. Indeed, in his column in the Atlanta Constitution on September 17, 1941, McGill wrote:

“In the first place our courts, to our shame and, although no one seems to see it, to our very great financial cost, never take Negro crime seriously. A Negro murderer, killing another Negro, rarely receives any severe punishment. Juries and prosecutors have, for years, viewed them lightly as just another Negro killing, and therefore, of not much importance.” (Ralph McGill – Crime, Standards, Methods 9-17-1941)

He remained one of a handful of White journalists that understood that any law or process or social practice that devalued Black life also made Black people the more likely targets of violence by killers of all races. He also noted that many members of Atlanta’s then all-White police department had poor training and were “quick-on-the-trigger.”

I thought about Ralph McGill after the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in February of 2012. When Jordan Davis of Atlanta, Georgia was killed in Jacksonville, Florida later in November, I again thought about McGill, arguably one of the most vocal writers who paid serious attention to Black-on-Black and White-on-Black violence and the institutionalized racism in the criminal justice systems of Georgia and the nation. I will not recount how Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin died needless and preventable deaths. I will leave it to you to read the details of Davis’ death on your own. (Take a minute and read Madison Gray’s very brief Time Magazine report “With Echoes of Trayvon Martin, Florida Man Claims Self Defense in Shooting Death of Teen.”) Yet, I wonder what McGill might have said about the horrible killings of these two unarmed Black teenagers by two men—One of Peruvian and Jewish extraction and the other a White man. I am sure he would have had much to say about the racial dynamics surrounding these two killings and the law known as “Stand Your Ground.”

Nearly half the states in this country have “Stand Your Ground” laws. At minimum, these laws allow an individual the right to use deadly force if that individual has a reasonable belief that their lives are threatened. Importantly, the law typically states that it is not necessary for a threatened individual to retreat from the perceived danger. The jury is still out on whether this kind of law has reduced crime rates anywhere. It is important to note, however, that there is nothing in these laws that give citizens the right to provoke and/or create a potentially volatile scenario where they place themselves in danger and then use deadly force in response to the dangerous scenario they created.

The fact that George Zimmerman, charged with second degree murder of Trayvon Martin, was told by a 911 operator not to follow Martin, has forced Zimmerman’s attorneys to drop the use of “Stand Your Ground” as a part of his defense. The fact that Michael Dunn, charged with the murder of Jordan Davis (and also charged with attempted murder of the other teens in the SUV), told these kids to turn their music down at a gas station is also problematic. Most people do not stay at a gas station for very long. Is it safe or even logical to tell total strangers what to do or what not to do while they are seated in their own vehicles at a public place like a gas station at 7:30 in the evening? Think about it. Will Florida lawmakers ever understand that the state’s “Stand Your Ground” laws are not always working in the best interests of its citizens? McGill would have recognized the counterproductive and dangerous potential for abuse in “Stand Your Ground” legislation.

When I finally got the opportunity to read some of the newspaper columns written by McGill, I noticed some important qualities: He spoke his mind about what was going on in the city and the world at that moment. Yet, he did so with an eye on the future. Like many of Atlanta’s early boosters, he always prescribed the course of action that he believed was best for the city of Atlanta—the entire city of Atlanta. He knew that crime, racial discrimination, racial virulence, and the like, were bad for the city. He was as practical and he was ethical.

I do not know exactly what McGill might have said or asked about the killings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis. Yet, I have little doubt that he would understand and endorse the necessity of raising the following questions about how citizens interpret their rights as defined in “Stand Your Ground” law: How does the “Stand Your Ground” law define “feeling threatened”? If you look menacing or say something that makes me feel afraid, will the law allow me the right to use deadly force against you based solely on my assumption of what I think you might do? Do citizens need more than the basic right of self-defense? What might an angry person do if they are armed and know that they might be able to get away with killing someone because, by law, they do not have to retreat from danger? Much like Atlanta in 1941, does not this law encourage people to choose to kill one another? Don’t these kind of laws eventually breed a flagrant disregard for the law? McGill wrote that, “Anything that breeds contempt for the law is costly.” He was right.

When I asked my Mama why she liked Ralph McGill, she simply said,

“He made sense and he was always, always fair. He always asked for justice and the fair treatment of all citizens. Justice and fair treatment were the only things Black people wanted.”

Justice and fair treatment are still all we want.

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

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9+ Goals for Black Folks for the Next Four Years and Beyond

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

by Leslye Joy Allen

Historian, Educator, Theatre and Jazz Advocate, Doctoral Student

1. Do not spend one dime at anything owned or managed by Donald Trump. Trump is within his rights to dislike President Obama; he is within his rights to criticize President Obama’s policies. He should not be allowed, however, to disrespect the office of the president simply because the person who occupies that office is a person of African descent. He can call his behavior whatever he wants to call it, but if you are Black, you know exactly what Trump’s problem is. Do not spend your money with him or with any person or organization that does business with him. Here’s an extra history lesson on Donald Trump for you: When Trump filed for bankruptcy over a decade ago because his casinos lost money, he tried to blame federal and state laws that have little control over Native American casinos. Because Native American Nations are technically sovereign nations within the United States, states and the federal government have not exercised a high degree of regulation on these casinos when they are operated on lands owned by Native American Reservations. Trump voiced opposition to some states and the federal government’s lack of interference and regulation of Native American casinos because he wanted to monopolize the casino industry. What kind of a person would deny Native Americans—arguably the most oppressed group in the United States—a means of self-determination?

2. Boycott Florida. Keep your Black behinds off its beaches and out of its hotels. Stay out of Disneyland. Do not even buy Florida oranges and orange juice. Here’s another history lesson: In 1990 White Cubans in Miami and other Florida cities designated South African leader Nelson Mandela persona non grata because he dared praise Fidel Castro for supporting him when Mandela was fighting against an apartheid system that demoralized and murdered hundreds of thousands of South African Blacks. Do not misunderstand—White Cubans have the right to hate Fidel Castro. He stripped many of them and their ancestors of their property in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. Other individuals were imprisoned and brutalized. To diminish or disregard Castro’s persecution of them is not fair. However, many of these same White Cubans also persecuted and routinely discriminated against Black Cubans. Moreover, when any group of people suffer persecution—particularly as long and as virulently as Black South Africans—you would think that Mandela, a man wrongly imprisoned for 27 years, would receive some level of understanding and empathy from other persecuted individuals. Mandela did not receive that kind of consideration in Florida.

Florida has also had a lot of trouble with voting procedures. Remember the state needed federal and Supreme Court intervention to settle the 2000 presidential election. Florida is also the same state that spent much of 2012 trying to disenfranchise voters to the point where it angered so many voters that they came out in record numbers to vote in the presidential election. That number included entire communities of Latinos, African Americans, Jews, women, and etcetera. It also took the state three days to finish counting the votes.

This is also the state where in February 2012 Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black boy, was killed walking home from a store, unarmed. We can grant George Zimmerman, his killer, the right to call the police and say that Martin looked suspicious. Yet, until he actually saw Martin do something, Zimmerman should have stayed in his car as the 911 Operator told him to do. Do you need me to keep going? Do not give Florida your money; and demand this boycott of Florida from all Black organizations, performance artists, politicians, clergy, you name it. We have earned the right to protect our interests.

3. Keep your money in your pocket and in your bank account as much as possible. Many of President Obama’s enemies think that WE Black folks only take handouts from the government rather than earning a combined $836 billion dollars a year working on a variety of jobs and in a variety of professions. So many of the President’s enemies do not know or believe that WE Black folks place a minimum of over $500 billion dollars (or more) back into the United States economy every year. Since so many folks assume WE contribute nothing, let us hold on to our money and spend it wisely and only with those businesses, corporations, and individuals that put something tangible back in our communities. If you want to know where our money goes, visit: Target Market News and read the best consumer and spending reports on Black Americans on the web.

4. Face the reality that we need to cut federal spending. Some social programs need a serious overhaul or elimination. For example, the Housing Voucher Program (formerly called “Section 8 housing”) demands that the people that qualify for such housing must have an income that is at least 50% less than the average income in the neighborhood where the house of their choice is located. Rental rates are based on the average rental rates in the neighborhood where the houses are located. Typically Housing voucher renters pay 30 per cent of that average rental rate, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) paying the remaining 70 percent to the owner of the property. Occasionally renters’ portion of rents are raised should they begin to earn higher salaries. However, there is no time limit on how long an individual can remain in this kind of housing. There is no concrete incentive in this program for participants to seek higher-paying jobs and risk disqualification from participation in the program. Even worse, if property values suddenly go up in a neighborhood where some Housing Voucher renters live, these same renters have another risk: they might be priced out of the houses they currently rent and live in. Why continue to rent to a Housing Voucher Renter if you can acquire another renter that can afford the higher rents without the assistance of HUD? It is time to set some limits.

5. For that percentage of Black Americans who have problems with Latinos and other immigrants, remember that a considerable number of Latinos and other immigrants are also people with African ancestry (whether they admit it or not). While I have certainly met many folks who would rather die than highlight or admit any African ancestry, I have also met many more who freely acknowledge and embrace their Africanity! Many of them have lived here in this country for a long time and many others who are recent arrivals are here to stay, so you would do well to build or continue building coalitions with them and find ways to work together.

6. Do not put up with racism, but do not hyperventilate about it either. Some White folks are not going to change. Stop wasting your time, efforts and energy trying to change them. And those White folks that you know that are always so nice to you, but who always try to look the other way when you or someone else brings up a racist incident; and when they can no longer ignore what happened they try to act like that kind of incident is so unusual—Be courteous to them, but keep them at arms length. No matter how seemingly innocuous and/or well-meaning and/or kind and/or generous they may be, any person or group of people that attempts to deny the obvious are part of the problem. It is not your job to teach them or fix them. No one can fix anything if one refuses to look at it for what it is.

7. Invest in Africa! Hell, the Chinese are already heavily invested and building in several developing African countries. You might as well join the effort.

8. Global Warming is not a joke; and we as a people contribute as much or more to the problem as anyone. Read everything you can from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) (I have been a member for 15 years). Study the reports on the household and cosmetic products you use at Environmental Working Group (EWG). Make sure you read their report “Pollution in Minority Newborns,” if you want to know how serious this is. Check out my old blog “Mercy, Mercy Me: Black, Clean and Green!” plugging a younger and progressive Black man who runs a business that offers products that help clean up the environment and save you money in the process.

9. Talk to people and listen to people who do some kind of work or express ideas that are different from the work you do and from the ideas you express and believe in. This is how new ideas are born and it is also the best way to find out what is truly going on with people you may someday have to rely on. I recently met a group of young academics that only socialized with each other. These same academics also wrote some of the most useless scholarly work I have ever read. I also have met many younger performance artists (35 and under) who do the same thing—they only interact with one another and still cannot figure out why no one comes to see the show! If you do not communicate with folks outside your profession and inadvertently imply that those other folks’ contributions are not as important as your own contributions, then you cannot expect them to follow you or support you. The current Republican Party and Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign provides a good lesson—They lost the election for a variety of reasons. Yet, they truly lost the bid for the presidency because they only talked to each other and they believed that their opinions were the only ones that mattered; everybody else had to have been wrong. Do not stay in the same kind of cocoon, that is unless you want to resemble the current Republican Party.

10. This line is for you to add your own personal goal. You know what you want to do. You know what you are capable of doing. Do it!

Peace.

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

Much To Do With Manhood

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

By Leslye Joy Allen

Historian, Educator, Theatre & Jazz Advocate, Doctoral Student

I strongly urge every one to read “Fear of a Black President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in September 2012’s Atlantic Magazine; and “Barack X: Race and the Obama Presidency” by Atlanta’s own Jelani Cobb posted on October 8, 2012 in The New Yorker. These are two superior essays that deal with the shifting attitudes about race as this nation examines the record of our current President Barack Obama. While I cannot give you an analysis of everything Coates and Cobb discussed, I can say that these essays are masterpieces by two very thoughtful Black scholars.

It is worth mentioning that Coates noticed a definitive and more negative shift in the manner in which some members of the Right viewed and spoke about Obama once he came out and stated that if he had a son that son would look like Trayvon Martin. He also stressed that the President did not point accusatory fingers at anyone, but simply asked for a thorough investigation of the killing of the unarmed teenager. However, Cobb beautifully and uniquely compared Obama to the late Malcolm X. Once Malcolm X returned from his pilgrimage to Mecca and reappraised his approach to dealing with America’s racial problems, he was confronted by many people, Black and White, who were not prepared to accept his evolution into an activist that would and could build multiracial coalitions to fight for racial and economic justice. Cobb underscored that like Malcolm X, Obama simultaneously represents different things to different sets of people, almost none of who are prepared to grant him much wiggle room to change.

In both essays Obama appears as much set free by his racial identity as he is boxed-in by it. Although Coates and Cobb’s commentary was deeply moving, I noticed how their and others’ discussions about President Obama and the death of Trayvon Martin have so rarely focused on gender, on the very idea of manhood and even Black manhood itself.

As a self-designated Black man—and please, let us not discuss the fantasy that Black Americans are racially pure because miscegenation, during and after slavery, ended that purity—President Obama has, according to many pundits, simply not been able to publically show anger because, God-forbid, he might appear to White voters as the stereotypical angry Black man. Black male aggression (and violence) is fine on a football field or against other Black people or in the movies. Yet, such imagined or real aggression is not acceptable in the Whitehouse or on a street in a gated suburban enclave: that is, if you believe the late Trayvon Martin was the aggressor against neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman who pulled the trigger on Martin allegedly in self-defense.

For Black men, any demonstration of a more forceful masculinity is fraught with dangers. If Black men act angry and are loud, they risk stigmatization as “thugs,” or worse they might conjure up that age-old stereotype, the “Black Buck.” The “Black Buck” was almost always a villainous rapist and/or thief and/or murderer or all of the above. The stereotype is almost as old as the American slavery that allowed White southern slave holders to manufacture it, in part, to justify Whites’ continued enslavement and persecution of Black people. Black people en masse, but Black men in particular, Whites reasoned, needed supervision.

President Obama knows this history of Black America. Was Trayvon Martin familiar with this history? Does George Zimmerman know anything about this narrative? We do not know. We also cannot know if Zimmerman saw (or sees) himself as somehow having transcended that category known as “person of color” due to his having a Jewish father. The media first described George Zimmerman as, “Hispanic White” or “White Hispanic,” to the surprise and confusion of many enlightened members of an ethnically and racially diverse Hispanic American population, many of who have some African and/or Amerindian ancestry themselves.

When protests over Martin’s death became a national and then an international cause célèbre, the media pivoted and identified Zimmerman as the visibly brown-complexioned man of Peruvian extraction on his mother’s side that most of us already assumed he was. So, what does all of this mean? Well, it means that President Obama and George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin have much in common, even if their commonality is not strikingly evident.

Obama, Martin, and Zimmerman are (and were) manipulated and trapped, by real and perceived definitions of masculinity—masculinity viewed through the prism of race and certain inter- and intra-racial expectations. All three males are confined not only by their own definitions of manhood, but also by classifications that come from others who place certain expectations on them for reasons that have everything to do with their race and gender.

Zimmerman has a police record.—He once fought a police officer that tried to arrest one of his friends. Such a brawl appears, on the surface, as one example of swaggering male bravado. If Trayvon Martin did in fact confront Zimmerman—the man who was following him—he probably did so in order not to appear weak or afraid. Remember, Martin was on the phone with his girlfriend, a young woman who told him to run. How many boys, to say nothing of men, want to appear weak or afraid in front of women who are important to them? While we will never have a complete account of that tragic night in February 2012, it is plausible that Martin’s flawed teenage wisdom incorrectly told him to “Stand His Ground,” pardon the pun. How many fathers and men (and mothers for that matter) have you heard tell sons, nephews, and any male friend or family member to, “Protect yourself; protect your mother, your sisters, your girlfriends, your wives. Do not start a fight, but do not allow anyone to push you around or run you away. BE A MAN!” For most of us, the opposite of being a man is to be a coward. And then…

There was President Obama’s polished and fact-filled, but rather lackluster, performance in the first Presidential debate of 2012. Critics rightfully thought he should have hammered away at some of Mitt Romney’s falsehoods. Instead, Obama seemingly held back, and people on all sides of the political spectrum saw Romney as the winner. The president appeared to many people as weak. Was he tired? Maybe. Has his notoriety as being cool and level headed, restricted his responses? Perhaps. We do not know. Yet, there is such a thing as being too calm or even too cautious. I would not wish the balancing act that the President has performed for nearly four years on anyone. However, there was something about the glee coming from many folks on the Right, that made Romney look like the Great White Hope—all puns intended—a man that had the stamina to beat a Black man.

I do not know what may happen in the next debate or in November 2012. Perhaps everything I have written here will become obsolete in just a few days. Yet, I do know this. At this late stage of the game, President Obama has little to lose if he shows a flash of righteous anger. In fact, I believe he is entitled to it. And here is why: In a gated community in Sanford, Florida, neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman might not have followed a Black female for no other reason than her being Black. It is easy to dismiss a Black female as harmless even when they often are not. Zimmerman did not follow Trayvon Martin because of something Martin did or was doing. He followed Martin because of what he thought Martin might do. And Black males always might do something, right?

I do not want to give the impression that we Black females have not been and are not subjected to some of the worst brutalities and indignities. Yet, Black females, are too often dismissed as non-threatening simply because we are women. WE Black women fight for our personhood, not our womanhood. And because we are often dismissed, those of us with brains can use our inconsequentiality to get away with any number of things that Black men might be reprimanded for or killed for attempting to do. It is no accident that it was Black females who first refused to relinquish their seats to White passengers on those buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 (and there were several who did it before Rosa Parks). A Black man or boy might simply have been killed. WE sisters have always known how to use our persecutors’ varied and negative definitions of us against those same persecutors.

Now, too many folks followed President Obama in the mistaken belief that the sheer virility of his Black manhood, with all of its alleged hyper-masculine implications, would cause the earth to spin in a different direction and the “Magic Negro” would appear and solve everyone’s problems. Throughout history Black folks have often been viewed simultaneously as having some special qualities all the while being villainized, often by the same people. This is not new. When folks on the Left and the Right discovered the President to be a mere, albeit talented and highly intelligent, mortal Black man, the disappointment resonated everywhere. How dare he defy that racialized masculine stereotype of what Black manhood must be, should be. George Zimmerman bought into the flip side of this fallacy and followed and subsequently shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager in alleged self-defense. He has arrived at this tragic moment in his life precisely because he mistakenly believed that the boy needed to be followed in the first place. Yet, Zimmerman himself could not/cannot escape the stigma(s) that follow “men of color” either. He was first conveniently a “White Hispanic.” He became a “Brown man” the moment public opinion turned up the heat about the killing of Trayvon Martin. So here is my message to President Obama:

Your enemies will not acknowledge your triumphs no matter how gracious you are, no matter how genteel you are, no matter how big the victory, no matter how much you love and respect your wife or spend quality time with your daughters. Some of your allies worry that if you show any anger you will frighten someone–mainly some already nervous White folks. But here is the dilemma, you already frighten a lot of people for reasons we all understand. No matter how skinny or seemingly innocuous or peaceful or tempered your demeanor and responses may be, you remain a threat, a Black male threat. (WE also know that if you had been 17-years-old in Florida and walking back from the store wearing a hoodie, you too probably would have been followed or worse.) Now, I am not suggesting that you show up at a campaign rally or a staff meeting or a debate and punch somebody’s lights out. I have no desire for you or any other Black man to be violent, loud or profane. I expect decorum at all times. However, since you are already perceived as a threat, you might as well turn up the heat. History has shown that turning up the heat is all our enemies truly respect. WE, your sisters, know what real dignified Black manhood looks like. WE have been warmed by it, loved by it, respected by it, protected by it and defended by it; and WE have your back!

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

A Stranger in the Neighborhood – The Worse Case Scenario

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

by Leslye Joy Allen

Historian, Educator, Theatre & Jazz Advocate, Doctoral Student

(*Update 3-29-2012: When I wrote and published the piece below on March 25, 2012, news reports stated that there had been a physical altercation between Martin and Zimmerman in which Zimmerman had a bloody nose and blood on the back of his head. A new video obtained by ABC news showed Zimmerman being brought into police custody, also showed that he had no signs of physical injury or blood anywhere on his person. Then in a couple of days there were new accusations that the video had been doctored–a new video showed Zimmerman with gashes on the back of his head. I am, however, leaving the contents of this blog “as is” because there are some questions that need to be answered that have little to do with how badly Zimmerman was allegedly injured by Martin. A hyperlink to the “first” ABC video is provided at end of this blog.*)

I will not bore you by retelling what has already been reported about the fatal and tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. If you have been anywhere near a television or the internet, you know several stories about this already. I would like to share my take on what questions need to be asked about this case and to share my own personal experiences with fear.

I remember the first time I called the police because I saw a person walking around my neighborhood who I had never seen before. The person stopped at every house, looked in a few neighbors’ windows, and they did not seem to be selling anything. I called the police, looked out my window at the person and wrote down everything from what they were wearing to how old I thought they were. I have done this a couple of times, once when the person was Black like me and another time when the person was White. As a police officer once told me, “You ladies should not be taking chances. Call the police when you see anything out of the ordinary.” In each instance the person had a legitimate reason for being in the neighborhood, but I let the police question these individuals and then waited for the police to stop by my house to let me know what they discovered and to assure me that I had nothing to worry about.

Right now George Zimmerman is under fire for his fatal shooting of Black,17-year-old,140 pound Trayvon Martin whom Zimmerman claims attacked him from behind. Most people are reasonably having a hard time understanding how Zimmerman, who weighs 250 pounds, was over powered by what is obviously a slender teenage boy. That Zimmerman had a bloody nose when police arrived on the scene does raise the possibility that Trayvon might have, at some point, hit the man in the face.

Friends of Zimmerman have come forward to paint him as someone who was certainly not racist; someone who mentored a young Black boy; and a man who has been crying and feels very bad about what has transpired. He should feel bad, because if the police had properly conducted their investigation, Zimmerman might be in a jail cell where he would probably feel much safer than he feels right now. He and his defenders understand his suspicions about Trayvon Martin, but there has been no statement from Zimmerman or anyone in his camp that suggests he has the faintest understanding that his actions probably frightened the hell out of Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman and all other parties also need to understand that even if he is not a racist as he and some of his defenders have claimed, that many people who are not Black and who bear no particular ill-will against the Black community often harbor some dangerous and downright stupid stereotypes about Black people. You do not need to be a virulent racist to harbor stereotypes about any group of people. I have met many White and allegedly non-racist liberals who have assumed certain things about ALL Black people, only to embarrass themselves when they discover their mistake.

There are some questions that should plague everyone about this fatal shooting. First, let us suppose a HYPOTHETICAL scenario where Trayvon Martin jumps George Zimmerman from behind and actually physically gets the best of him. If this scenario is true then the next question is what motivated Trayvon Martin to attack in this way? What would you do if someone continued to follow you and you were not near your house? If Zimmerman was safely driving in his SUV with a loaded gun, following Trayvon Martin, then why did Zimmerman not just crack his car window, say, “Hello” to Trayvon and then calmly ask the boy what he was doing in the neighborhood or if he lived in the neighborhood. And if the person walking in your neighborhood seemed so threatening, why not follow from a safe distance and wait for the police.

I remember driving one night, with a car following me; the experience was unbelievably frightening. I drove until I found a well-lit parking lot, populated with several people. The car followed me into the parking lot, made a U-Turn and then quickly sped away. My heart raced with fear, but I hurried home glad that nothing happened. I do not know what I might have done (or might do) if I were out walking and suddenly discovered someone was following me in a car. If you are walking, you cannot outrun the vehicle. Then, what would you think if the driver exited the car? Certainly, I might be convinced that the person was trying to harm me in some way. Being followed also provokes feelings of vulnerability and anger.

George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin when he did not have to do so. WHY SHOULD ANYONE EXPECT A BOY WALKING DOWN A STREET TO STOP FOR A COMPLETE STRANGER THAT THE BOY BELIEVES IS FOLLOWING HIM? If Zimmerman’s account of what happened is correct: that Trayvon Martin jumped him from behind, then Zimmerman should be prepared to explain why he thought Trayvon Martin did this, and how such a small framed boy managed to over power a 250 pound man. I must admit that when you think your life is threatened, fear will make you much stronger than you ever knew you were. If Zimmerman’s account is correct then he needs to explain his role in provoking such a response from a boy who was a good student and who had no criminal record. The key word here is “boy.”

We probably will never know exactly what was said by Zimmerman or Martin. It is always possible that a nasty verbal exchange took place between them; this would not come as a surprise. However, that Trayvon Martin told his girlfriend over his cell phone that he was being followed is frightening. She too is an adolescent who told him to run. He said he would just walk fast. Black boys who “walk fast” are not always doing so because they have done something wrong or fleeing the scene of a crime. But anyone who is afraid will walk fast or possibly run.

Even in the worst of all possible–not actual–scenarios, no matter how mature or responsible Trayvon Martin might have been in his too short life, his ability to reason like a mature adult was still a year or two away. Some maturity comes with time and experience. Some mistakes in judgment are expected when you are a teenager; and no one expects a 17-year-old boy to never make the wrong decision. At the risk of invoking a stereotype about all adolescent males, can someone tell me whether they have ever met a young teenage boy who has not had at least one fisticuff over something silly or even something serious? Yet, it was completely rational to try to walk or run away from someone Trayvon believed was following him. For Zimmerman to assume that his following someone walking down the street would not be frightening to that person is about as absurd and irrational as anyone can get.

The public may never know the exact details of what transpired on that tragic night in February. I freely admit my anger over this boy’s death. Yet, no matter what happens next or whose story becomes the narrative of this tragedy, there is still one clear fact that no one can escape or ignore, and that fact is that George Zimmerman was not/is not a teenager, but A GROWN MAN who should have known better. Trayvon Martin left this world, his family, and his friends while he was just a boy.

(*This is a hyperlink to the surveillance video of George Zimmerman being taken into custody by the Sanford, Florida police on the night he killed Trayvon Martin: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/trayvon-martin-case-exclusive-surveillance-video-george-zimmerman/story?id=16022897)

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

Soldiers, Scholars, and “Black Redtail Angels” in Southwest Atlanta

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

“White American bomber crews reverently referred to them as “The Black Redtail Angels” because of the identifying red paint on their tail assemblies and because of their reputation for not losing bombers to enemy fighters as they provided fighter escort to bombing missions over strategic targets in Europe.” –Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Dryden (1920-2008) from A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman

Back in early December 2011, I received an email from a cousin that contained a trailer from the movie Red Tails, a film about the Tuskegee Airmen directed by Anthony Hamilton, produced and largely funded by George Lucas. Not long after I received the email with the trailer, I was thinking about my one and only meeting with the late Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. “Chuck” Dryden.

I had called Dryden when I briefly served as an intern for a World War II Oral History project. When I called him, he looked at his Caller ID and determined that I was calling from a phone in Southwest Atlanta. He told me to hang up the phone and come on over. With no hesitation, I drove to his home, which was about six minutes from my own.

Dryden was a decorated Tuskegee Airman, and one of many Tuskegee Airmen that lived in Atlanta, which is home to more Tuskegee Airmen than any other city in the nation. A member of the famous 99th Pursuit Squadron, and later the 332nd Fighter Group, it was Dryden who led a group of six Black fighter pilots in aerial combat in Italy in 1943—This was the first time in aviation history that Black pilots in the U. S. Army Air Corps engaged an enemy in aerial combat.

I spent an afternoon at his home in Southwest Atlanta back in the summer of 2007 where he told me how he had to be perfect as a fighter pilot if we were going to stop Hitler’s Third Reich and if he and others were going to prove that Black men made excellent fighter pilots.

That afternoon I learned that he was much, much more than a fighter pilot. I had owned his memoir A Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman for years, but at that time, I had not yet had an opportunity to read it in its entirety. However, from what I had read and from my conversation with him, it was apparent that he was very much a scholar.

We discussed history, politics, art, World War II, U. S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, the upcoming “Democratic Presidential nomination” of Barack Obama, and of all things: my Master’s thesis. He insisted that I tell him more about my research on the White politicians that made up the Georgia Know-Nothing Party, a group that did not want Georgia to secede from the Union as the South reeled from the election of Abraham Lincoln.

I should add that we also talked some mess! I noticed a picture of Dryden and his beautiful and brilliant wife Marymal Dryden. She was not there when I visited, but I remember reading one of her essays. The handsome couple stood there in the photo with the Arizona sunset as their background.

“You remember that scene in the movie Waiting to Exhale where Angela Bassett burns up all of her ex-husband’s stuff in the car,” he asked. “Yeah,” I answered. “Well, we are standing right there in that same spot where she burned up everything.” We both burst into laughter.

He could not stand upright, as he had been afflicted with a severe stroke. Yet, his mind was razor sharp. He thought U. S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was dangerous. Moreover, of more than a dozen WWII vets that I spoke with, ALL of them thought this way. In less than a year after my wonderful visit, Lt. Col. Dryden passed on to the ancestors.

Not long after his death, a young woman in one of my history classes informed me that she would be attending the United States Air Force Academy. In one of our conversations where we talked about everything from the fact that the Air Force had fewer Blacks than any other part of the armed services, she told me that she met Lt. Col. Dryden before his death.

When I asked her about their conversation, she looked me straight in the eye and said that Dryden’s face lit up when she introduced herself and told him she was planning to go the United States Air Force Academy.

He told her, “When you get to the Air Force Academy, you give THEM HELL!” We both laughed because we knew what he meant, and we offered no apologies for his pointed audacity-filled instructions to her to kick some you-know-what at the Air Force Academy.

Nearly four generations her senior, Dryden let this young sister know that his expectations of her were high. He also knew that his vote of confidence in her abilities would buttress her against any doubts she might develop should she encounter those individuals who thought the United States Air Force had no need of Black female officers and pilots. Like every other Tuskegee Airman I know of, Dryden never lost his swagger, his sense of possibility. Like many other men and women of his era, he expected much from himself and from all of us who were born after him.

Dryden and my parents were contemporaries. I am a late born child—my mom turns 91 years young this year. If my father were living, he would be turning the age of 92. The men and women of Dryden and my parents’ era not only lived long enough to see the world change, but they were largely responsible for changing it.

Folks my age and younger often complain about what needs to be done to create racial and economic justice. Many of us have been vocal critics of our elders, and often our analyses of what did or did not work in the past have been correct. However, if there is any lesson to learn from the “Black Redtail Angels,” and our elders from the World War II era and beyond is their dedication to education and their examples of extreme sacrifice.

These men and women—Black and White— those in the military and those keeping the home front, were in their twenties when Adolph Hitler threatened to destroy any semblance of racial or ethnic equality in Europe and elsewhere. I shudder to think of how different the world might have been had he and his minions been successful.

We often forget that the Third Reich did not just target Jews for extermination. It exterminated and planned the extermination of Poles, and all Slavic peoples, persons with mental and physical disabilities, Gays and Lesbians, and yes, Afro-Germans.

We owe folks like Lt. Col. Dryden and Lt. Col. Hap Chandler, a White fighter pilot from Toccoa, Georgia. Not long after I met Chandler, I learned that he had shown up at a meeting of Georgia’s Tuskegee Airmen to thank them for keeping him alive and to apologize for the awful way that “members of my race treated you.”

Chandler also had that same swagger, intellectualism, and expectation that I noticed about Dryden. In the late 1940s, he also belonged to that small but growing number of White veterans who had to reassess their erroneous beliefs about alleged “Black inferiority” that remained endemic to every aspect of American life and was the very basis of the social and economic order of the American South. I should add that Chandler was cool. He drove a Jaguar and arrived for his interview wearing a suit and tie and holding hands with his seventy-year-old girlfriend.

The Tuskegee Airmen, and other Black World War II veterans came back home to the United States and demanded equality from a country that denied them the very thing they had fought for abroad. The modern-day Civil Rights movement began with the efforts and work of all of these men and women.

They went to college (or back to college) in record numbers under the G. I. Bill. They sought advanced degrees, pursued well-paying skilled jobs in new industries, started businesses, and swelled the numbers of the Black middle class so that you and I could do much of what we are able to do now. They bought homes and sent kids to college.

They registered and voted in every election. They marched with and sometimes paid to get civil rights activists, students and radicals out of jail. They set examples for us to follow and repeat, and made some mistakes for us to study and avoid, but they never stopped moving and searching for new ways to create a more just and equitable nation for their children and grandchildren.

They did all of these things without computers, cable television, the Internet, email, blogs, social media or cell phones. We should do no less. Peace.

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

The Paper Yet to be Returned

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

by Leslye Joy Allen Historian, Educator, Theatre & Jazz advocate, Doctoral Student

My last blog for Cascade Patch attempted to remind everyone that Tuskegee Airman, one Lt. Col. Charles W. Dryden had a clear vision about what and whom he was fighting against when he valiantly fought in World War II.

Yet, another group of soldiers now struggle with what it meant to be in the military in Iraq; and some are still trying to understand the complicated mission of remaining in Afghanistan. The following is a personal story about one of my former students:

Back in 2008 when I was teaching United States and World History courses at a local junior college, I encountered a young 20-something male student who I initially feared might earn an “F” in my class. Like many students I have encountered in recent years, writing was not his forte; and history is research and writing intensive. However, much like many other students, he performed much better on his second paper after he followed the directions, suggestions, and criticisms I wrote on his first paper.

It is a thrill to watch a struggling student take off at top speed and make real, concrete progress. This student, who I will refer to here as “M,” did just that. There is still only one problem: M has not yet been able to pick up his final paper, a paper where he worked like a trooper to earn an “A.”

A few weeks before that semester in 2008 ended, M approached me after class to let me know that he was in the U. S. Army Reserves. He was part of a reserve troops that would soon go to Iraq. His deployment could occur at any time and at a moment’s notice. He feared he would have to leave for Iraq before the semester ended. He worried about missing his final examinations. I told him not to worry. He had enough graded assignments for me to figure out his grade point average if it became necessary.

Since educators and employers are required by law to accommodate, as best we can, those employees and students who may be called to military service, I had to come up with the best possible solution for M. After discussing the matter with my department head, I decided to wave his having to take my final examination. After a careful review of all of his grades, he averaged a solid “B.” He left for Iraq, however, before I could return his last paper.

A few days after his departure, he emailed me to let me know that he had safely arrived. He thanked me for all that I had taught him, and asked me to remember him in my prayers. He also told me that I had taught him to “think outside of the box.” I freely admit that I can be a bit radical and unorthodox. I would never have survived even working in the post office in Uncle Sam’s army. When M made that comment, I wondered how my teaching him to “think outside the box” would actually help him in Iraq.

I quickly responded and asked that he email me and his other instructors to let us know how he was doing. He responded that he would try to stay in touch, but that his commanding officer had warned him about sending too many emails. Because of where he was located in Iraq, it might be dangerous to regularly contact too many United States citizens by email as the area was potentially teeming with internet-savvy terrorists. Emails, he wrote, were particularly vulnerable to enemy infiltration. That worried me.

Sure enough, his emails abruptly stopped. Months after his departure, I wondered if he was still alive. I even caught myself paying extra attention to news reports of casualties in Iraq. Then, I misplaced the last paper I graded for him. Misplacing the paper felt like a bad omen. Then in 2009, I ran across a blog where a blogger had spoken with Paul Rieckhoff, the author of the Iraq Memoir Chasing Ghosts. Of soldiers in Iraq, Rieckhoff stated:

“This is not a drafted army, it’s a professional force, so folks are staying in longer, they’re older and they’re more likely to have families…But those who are being killed and injured are disproportionately young — the people you played soccer with and went to high school with.” (For the full article, go to: http://stand-up-4-veterans.tressugar.com/Toll-Iraq-US-Soldiers-3294102)

After I read the blog, I felt worse. I knew that any war almost always consists of young soldiers, but exactly how young? How often had military service in Iraq or Afghanistan interrupted college students’ educations?

Another year passed and soon, I briefly forgot about M. Then, in 2010, I got a phone call from a former co-worker. She received news that one of her former students was killed in Iraq. I did not know this particular student well, but she did. With both of us weeping over lives lost too young, I thought about M again. I did not email him for fear that I would not receive a reply email and again wonder if he was still alive. I could not and cannot imagine what the families of these young women and men have gone through during the course of the Iraq war and the seemingly endless problems in Afghanistan.

Right before this past Christmas 2011, I decided to sort through the tons of papers and assorted items that had accumulated into a small mountain on my dining room table. There were stacks of papers, books, photographs, and notebooks on the table and in boxes around the table and elsewhere in my house. We historians are the world’s most notorious packrats, always afraid that we might throw away some document we might need later for our research. Yet, enough was enough.

After sorting through all of the excess and deciding what might go into the recycling bin, I found the last paper M wrote that I graded at the bottom of one of my many boxes. Early Christmas morning, I summoned the nerve to email him to ask how he was doing, noting that I had just stumbled across the last paper he turned in for my World History class. FYI: M’s paper was about one of the Zanj revolts that took place in the Afro-Arabic world (Look it up if you do not know what I am talking about because I am not even going to define “Zanj” for any reader younger than M.)

Later that Christmas night, I received an email from M stating that he was well, but still in Afghanistan. The military has now deployed him OVER FIVE TIMES. Scheduled to return home in the summer of 2012, he noted that he felt like Iraq and Afghanistan were recipes for civil war. Indeed, he said, Afghanistan already was engaged in what he believed to be a civil conflict that neither the United States military’s presence (or absence) could remedy. Later on January 10, 2012, I stumbled on an article that described how the Taliban attempted to invade a government building in East Afghanistan. I worried again.

As a historian, I study and lecture about politics, the performance arts, racism, social change, and war all the time. Yet, nothing prepared me to watch a young scholar go off to war with his education interrupted or to contemplate that he might not make it back home.

M emailed me that the military had taught him how to think one way, but he emphasized that I had taught him another way to look at and examine the world.

“You taught me to see things for more than what is put in front of me,” he wrote. In the last weeks of 2011 and the first month or so of 2012, when we Black folks have lost so many of our brothers and sisters in so many ways, I am thankful, grateful, and rather proud of M’s compliment.

Yet, as far as I am concerned, U. S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq can only officially end for me when I can put M’s final graded paper in his hand.

Peace.

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

James Baldwin’s Soul is Still on Fire!

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Leslye "JOY" Allen

by Leslye “Joy” Allen Historian, Educator, Theatre & Jazz Advocate, Doctoral Student

On Thursday, May 23, 1963, writer and activist James Baldwin met privately with Robert F. Kennedy at Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia. Baldwin was infuriated by the virulence meted out on peaceful civil rights protestors by Birmingham, Alabama police. Robert Kennedy got an earful.

A second meeting was hastily held the next day, this time at Robert Kennedy’s New York City apartment. However, on that Friday, May 24, Baldwin brought along a group that can best be described as a “civil rights arsenal”!

Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Rip Torn, Dr. Kenneth Clark, freedom rider Jerome Smith, attorney Clarence B. Jones, Edwin C. Berry of Chicago’s Urban League, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau arrived at this meeting at Baldwin’s request.

Baldwin’s group came to discuss and complain to Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall (head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights wing) about President John F. Kennedy’s failure to use the power of the presidency to stem the police violence that continued to plague peaceful civil rights protesters.

The meeting of this group of individuals was not particularly successful. Yet, Baldwin’s outspokenness, audacity, and literary genius was—and remains—a source of both political and artistic inspiration.

My good friend, actor-writer-curator-activist, and now editor, Charles Reese is but one of many keepers of Baldwin’s legacy.

Reese—who stays in Southwest Atlanta whenever he is in town—is pulling double duty in the legacy preservation department. I learned about his plans when he and I had one of our long breakfast sessions at “The Beautiful Restaurant” on Cascade Road.

Back in the year 2000, Reese, a Morehouse College alumnus, had a daunting task. He had to figure out a way to preserve, protect, and promote the work of his good friend, fellow Morehouse alumnus and playwright Howard B. Simon who died that year of complications brought on by streptococcus meningitis—He was only 37 years old. Even more tragic, Simon never got a chance to read the great reviews theatre critics wrote about his seminal play James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire.

A Soul on Fire is not an account of what happened in Bobby Kennedy’s apartment that Friday in 1963. It is, rather, Simon’s vision of what Baldwin did, said, and imagined the day before.

Via the dramatic genius of Simon and the bravura performance of Reese in the title role, the play captured the essence of Baldwin and the spirit of the 1960s. With both Simon and Baldwin gone, Reese has not waivered in his determination to preserve the legacies of both men.

With a lot of tenacity (and a little help from his friends), Charles Reese has edited and published the play James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire by Howard B. Simon.*

Reese kicked off a book/play-signing tour on January 29, 2012 in Los Angeles with plans to go from city to city hosting book signings and reading salons, inviting the public to take part in the drama and the discussion.

I urge you to join the celebration of James Baldwin and Morehouse alums Howard B. Simon and Charles Reese. The play James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire is available at: Amazon.com.

For more information about hosting a book-signing and play-reading event; and to keep up with Charles Reese’s many multimedia projects (The James Baldwin Project, the Howard B. Simon Literary Canon and The Charles Reese Experience), go to: The Charles Reese Experience.

For additional historical information about James Baldwin and Howard B. Simon; and to keep up with the plans to develop a film version of the play, visit: James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire.

*Finishing the last edits and details in late December 2011, Charles Reese chose 2012 as the target year to promote the publication of Simon’s play because this year marks the 25th anniversary of Baldwin’s death. Baldwin’s body departed us on December 1, 1987 in Saint-Paul-De-Vence, France. His Soul, however, is Still On Fire! Peace.

Leslye Joy Allen is proud to support the good work of Clean Green Nation. Visit the website to learn more about it: Gregory at Clean Green Nation!

Leslye Joy Allen

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