Latest news with #Negro
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Council meeting about Cleveland Heights mayor turns contentious, ends abruptly
[Editor's note: This report contains language that may be considered offensive. Discretion is advised.] CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio (WJW) – A special city council meeting called Friday by council President Tony Cuda was to discuss allegations against Mayor Kahlil Seren. As FOX 8 News previously reported, protesters attended the council meeting Monday night to call for Seren to resign after it became public that a complaint was filed with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission regarding the mayor's wife Natalie McDaniel. Billy Joel cancels entire tour after diagnosis with rare brain disorder The complaint alleges McDaniel sent text messages with antisemitic speech targeting city employees and residents who are Jewish. Seren addressed the accusations in a 15-minute video posted to Facebook days later. He claimed that the allegations are false. Cleveland Heights City Council members said in Friday's meeting that Seren took too long to address the city, wasn't around city hall during the week, and had not responded to text messages asking if he was OK. Cuda asked Assistant Law Director Chris Heltzel what kind of role the council would have if the mayor were unavailable or inaccessible. Heltzel explained that there is an article in the city code that states the council president would be acting mayor if the mayor was not accessible, but made it clear that it's incredibly complicated to determine the definition of the mayor not being available and how a transfer of power would work. Heltzel also noted a certain provision in the law carried over from when Cleveland Heights had a city manger rather than a mayor. Heltzel later explained that council can approve a resolution calling for Seren's resignation, but does not have the legal power to force his resignation. Not long after that, Seren asked for time to speak in the meeting. He referred to the meeting as 'an exercise in elector politics,' which he called disappointing, but not surprising. Seren then explained why he didn't respond to Cuda's text message asking if he's OK. Then, he used offensive language toward the council. 'I just want to say this council by no means is my overseer, and I am not your Negro,' Seren said. Not long after, an exchange between Seren and Councilman Craig Cobb escalated and Cuda called to adjourn the meeting before reaching all of the items on the agenda. At that moment, residents with signs calling for Seren's resignation began addressing the mayor to his face. Guardians pitcher Ben Lively out the rest of the season, needs surgery Seren eventually stopped to speak to reporters. He didn't take any questions, but he called out the council by listing things they haven't accomplished and said they need to work on things that will help Cleveland Heights residents. 'There are substantive things that we should be looking at to improve the day-to-day experience of people in Cleveland heights,' Seren said. 'Now, that's the work that we're always doing, despite the slings and arrows here that I've been faced down with for the last 10 years of service to this city. I'm going to keep doing that work because I care about this city.' Seren indicated he won't be going anywhere during the remaining seven months of his term as mayor, despite calls for his resignation. Cleveland Heights resident James Bates, who was one of the residents shouting at Seren to resign, told FOX 8 News that the mayor isn't being upfront with the allegations and it would be better for the city if he moved on. 'He knows in his heart of hearts; he knows that he needs to resign, and the fact that he doesn't should tell you everything you need to know about Kahlil Seren. He is not a faithful person. He needs to go. Let me say that unequivocally: Khalil Seren, you need to go,' Bates said. Council members Anthony Mattox Jr. and Jim Posch did not attend the meeting. Council Vice President Davida Russell listened in via Zoom. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Atlantic
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
When William F. Buckley Jr. Met James Baldwin
In February 1965, three months after Barry Goldwater had been trounced by Lyndon B. Johnson in the presidential election, one of the Republican candidate's most forceful advocates, William F. Buckley Jr., had an important event on his calendar. Taking a break from his annual ski vacation in Switzerland with his wife, Pat, he made his way to England for a debate at the Cambridge Union with one of the most celebrated writers alive, the novelist, memoirist, critic, and essayist James Baldwin. Buckley had been paying attention to Baldwin. He had read and admired his novel Another Country, which subtly explored complex gay and racial themes. But he disliked Baldwin's journalism and his profuse commentary on race. Baldwin, he had written, 'celebrates his bitterness against the white community mostly in journals of the far political left,' which suggested complicity—or was it cowardice?—on the part of guilt-ridden white editors. Baldwin's presence in England was itself an event. He was there to promote the paperback edition of Another Country and to discuss a screenplay with a filmmaker. He also made himself available to journalists and students. And there was the debate with Buckley at the Cambridge Union—a debate on the subject of race in America. Baldwin's numerous venues were not, as it happened, limited to those of the left. His arguments, moreover, were original and unorthodox, and at times even paralleled Buckley's own. Baldwin, too, was skeptical of liberal programs and the meliorist principles they rested on. When he observed that the 'mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem,' a conservative could agree. The difference came in the conclusions Baldwin drew. The true lessons of race in America, he argued, began in what had been revealed about its white population. 'The interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man,' he wrote as early as 1953; 'it has created a new white man, too.' This was a year before the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public schools, and two years before the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet Baldwin understood that the white monopoly on racial discourse was already weakening. What that new white man seemed unable to understand, much less accept, was that 'this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.' It would never be so, because 'white power has been broken,' Baldwin had said in a debate with Malcolm X in 1961. 'And this means, among other things, that it is no longer possible for an Englishman to describe an African and make the African believe it. It's no longer possible for a white man in this country to tell a Negro who he is, and make the Negro believe this.' In the 1964 election, Johnson, the incumbent, had tagged Goldwater as an extremist, and had coasted to one of the most overwhelming victories in history, winning 44 states and the District of Columbia. And the extremist charge had a sound basis. Goldwater had been one of only six Republicans to vote against the landmark Civil Rights Act when the Senate passed it in June 1964. At the GOP's nominating convention in San Francisco a month later, a desperate attempt by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to add an anti-extremism plank to the party platform had been thunderously rejected. Five of the six states that Goldwater won in November—all but his own Arizona—were in the Deep South. The journalist Robert Novak observed that Goldwater and his allies had completed their makeover of the GOP into 'the White Man's Party.' Buckley was the right's undisputed intellectual leader, who as a speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case with remarkable fluency and wit. And a primary shaper of that new party was Bill Buckley. In the pages of National Review, the political fortnightly he had founded in 1955 and still edited, he and his colleagues continued to support segregation in the South, a decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown. In his writing, he referred to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil-rights movement as lawbreakers and agitators. Buckley had become, at age 39, the right's undisputed intellectual leader, who as a speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case with remarkable fluency and wit. Goldwater 'has near him at least one man who can think,' the novelist and Syracuse University professor George P. Elliott had warned. Commenting on an address Buckley had given to a college audience, Elliott judged him 'an all-or-none theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind,' partly because 'his criticism of the faults of the liberal rulers of the nation was incisive and accurate; his forensic power and control were by far the greatest I have heard in an American speaker.' Now, as Republican strategists struggled to move forward, Buckley's forensic talents were among the few assets they could count on. For years, Buckley had wanted to debate Baldwin. He was all the more eager to do so after the publication of Baldwin's polemic The Fire Next Time, in 1963. With this small, powerful book, Baldwin became a different writer: no longer a witness to racial injustice but a prophet of racial reckoning. Most of the book had been first published as a long article in The New Yorker in November 1962, and Buckley had read it during his preparation for a two-week visit to South Africa and Mozambique as a guest of their respective governments. Buckley was especially impressed by South Africa's prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, the principal creator of apartheid in 1948. To Buckley, apartheid—literally racial 'separatehood' in Afrikaans—was more than defensible. It was a kind of ideal system in a caste-divided society, what Jim Crow might have become if only its architects had been more systematic in their thinking and had embraced the concept of fully developed separate nations, Black and white. Despite Verwoerd's valiant efforts, Buckley reported in National Review, South Africa was beset with peril. The threat came from the 'beady eyes of the Communist propaganda machine,' which was cynically stirring the embers of 'black racism.' In Buckley's view, this left Verwoerd only one sensible option: cracking down on dissidents. For 'in such an eutectic situation it is necessary to maintain very firm control. Relentless vigilance' and 'relentless order' were required 'because the eudaemonic era has not yet come to Africa.' Eutectic, eudaemonic : Buckley had a weakness for arcane words, which he deployed as weapons. The more fragile his argument, the more syllables he used: 'preemptive obfuscations,' as one of his protégés, the novelist and critic John Leonard, called them. But in this instance, the tongue twisters could not obscure raw facts; 70 percent of South Africa's population was Black, and eventually that majority would assert itself and challenge white dominance—just what was happening in the American South. Baldwin also had things to say about South Africa and Verwoerd. The Fire Next Time included a bold assertion about the origins of radical evil over the past two millennia. 'Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves,' Baldwin wrote. White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power—'God is on our side,' says Dr. Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul. Baldwin did not pause to analyze. He did not allow the emotion to cool. He saw in Paul a zealous convert and proselytizer, and he also saw the intolerance, extremism, prejudice, and persecution that would come in the name of faith. The Christian world, he wrote, 'has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable.' With the Church's long history of anti-Semitism in the background, he stated bluntly: 'The fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority.' The Holocaust—the most radical instance of modern evil—was thus not truly surprising to him and other Black Americans. Just as Christians had monstrously mistreated Jews, so 'white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed.' Buckley had been affronted by the line Baldwin drew from Saint Paul to the gas chambers. But he was also well aware that Baldwin was steeped in Church history and teaching, and knew scripture far better than Buckley himself. The stepson of a Pentecostal minister, Baldwin had been a teenage preacher before abandoning what his book called 'the church racket'—the phrase all but calculated to stir the wellspring of Buckley rage. Nothing defined Buckley so fully as his Catholicism. He had been raised in the Church and as a teenager had talked of joining the priesthood. As recently as 1961, he had told an admirer, 'If I am ever persuaded that my attachment to conservatism gets in the way of my attachment to the Catholic Church, I shall promptly forsake the former.' At the same time, Buckley knew how deft Baldwin's glancing reference to Verwoerd had been. During the Second World War, Verwoerd had been enthusiastic in his support for Nazi Germany, and openly anti-Semitic. But Buckley was, among many other things, a first-rate editor. He recognized that Baldwin had written a major statement and must be met on his own ground. One National Review contributor had the intellectual and literary gifts to do it, a young critic whom Buckley esteemed above all others—Garry Wills. In 1958, when Wills had applied to Harvard's Ph.D. program in classics after a summer working at NR, Buckley had written a recommendation saying, 'There simply is no doubt in my mind that twenty-five years hence he will be conceded one of the nation's top critics and literary craftsmen.' (Wills had gone instead to Yale, which offered a better fellowship.) He was now teaching at Johns Hopkins and writing prolifically for NR. He could handle almost any subject—history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion. Better still, he had spent six years preparing for the priesthood, as a Jesuit, before being released from his vows so he could enjoy a secular life of marriage and family and pursue a literary career. Up to now, Wills had written very little on race, but what he had written was less ideological than most other NR commentary on the subject. Wills made no defense of segregation and was dismissive (like Buckley) of white racists who argued for their own biological superiority. From the July 2002 issue: The loyal Catholic What Buckley did not know was how formative race had been for Wills. He had grown up in the Midwest, but his family came from the South and were typical white southerners of the time. Once, 'on a family visit to Louisville,' Wills later recalled, 'my grandmother took me to Sunday Mass and a Black priest came out from the sacristy. My grandmother snatched me by the hand and hauled me outside. When I asked her why, she—who would never go without Mass on Sunday—said she could not stand to see a 'nigger' at the altar. I observed that she had Black women help her bake loaves of bread for sale in her kitchen, but she answered: 'A nigger does not deserve the dignity of the priesthood.' ' At Wills's Jesuit seminary near St. Louis, his training included orderly service in a hospital. Most of the patients were Black. He and other seminarians ' gave the men their baths, rubbed cream on to prevent bedsores, and washed the bodies of those who died.' Wills's best friend in the seminary was Black and 'told me of the obstacles the order had put in the way of his joining—he was bluntly told that Southerners in the novitiate would resent his presence.' This resistance was one reason, Wills believed, that meeting 'the demands (even legitimate demands) of some' to outlaw segregation might 'bend the permanent structure of our society permanently out of shape' and 'sacrifice the peace of all of us.' To that extent, Wills could sympathize with white southerners. But they must also respond humanely. This was the test being failed time and again. The permanent structure of society was Baldwin's theme too, only he was making the opposite case: The structure itself was rotten and awaited the match that would set it ablaze. Here Wills was ready to meet Baldwin. Unlike Buckley, who read just enough of books he disliked to collect ammunition for disparaging them, Wills brought Jesuitical thoroughness and precision to his reading. He read not only The Fire Next Time, but just about everything else Baldwin had published, and he was overwhelmed by its artistry and power. Wills had agonized over the assignment, he told Buckley in the winter of 1963. 'But after tearing up many attempts at the thing, I send this off immediately, before I decide to tear it up.' He still was afraid he had not risen to the task, because refuting Baldwin required 'new arguments for civilization'—and, Wills confessed, 'I don't know any.' There were only the old arguments, and under the pressure of Baldwin's impassioned language, they seemed to wilt. 'There is virtuosity, even a dark gaiety in his anger,' Wills wrote in his article. Baldwin, he went on, had an 'uncanny way of writing to a background music that somehow gets transmitted along with the words.' And his account of America's racial history was accurate. 'We have been cruel to the Negro,' Wills wrote. 'We have, more than we know; more than we want to know.' But Baldwin did not limit his attack to white America alone. He condemned the system of belief from which the entirety of Western civilization arose. 'He does not attack us for not living up to our ideals, for lapsing, for sinning, for being bad Christians,' Wills went on. 'He says we do not have any ideals: we do not believe in any of the things our religion, our civilization, our country stand for. It is all an elaborate lie whose sole and original function is to fortify privilege.' Baldwin's sweeping denunciation ignored the saving virtues of the Western tradition—its humanism, its ideas of justice and human dignity, its embrace of charity as a defining principle—the same ideals that informed his own writing. Yet reviewers seemed uninterested in pointing out this rather obvious omission. Why? This was the question Wills's essay asked and tried to answer. What looked like sympathy for Baldwin, he concluded, was in reality a condescending refusal to take him seriously—arrant hypocrisy that Baldwin himself exposed by 'attacking all our so-called beliefs, then standing back and observing that no one defends them. In fact, everyone rushes to defend him.' Instead, Wills wrote, somebody should take Baldwin's charges seriously enough to ask, not whether they are moving, or beautiful, or important, or sincerely meant—they are obviously all these, and there has been enough repetition of the obvious—but whether they are true. In depicting white evil in absolute terms, Wills believed, Baldwin foreclosed the possibility of redemption—this despite an evident history of moral growth and improvement. Wills acknowledged the discomfort of defending the existence and importance of ideals so brutally violated by the race to which one belonged, but insisted on its necessity. 'We must have the courage to defend the ideals we have, perhaps, not lived up to, but only known to be true. It takes a special courage to bear witness in this way; to be wrong, yet defend what was right; to be what one is, yet continue to fight for what one should have been; to oppose a better man than oneself in the service of a better creed than his.' From the July/August 2009 issue: Garry Wills on the daredevil Willam F. Buckley Nothing like this had ever been published in National Review. Even as Wills disagreed with Baldwin, he ceded him high authority as an artist and praised in exalted terms what the magazine's chief political theorist, James Burnham, in his book Suicide of the West, was soon to call 'the abusive writings of a disoriented Negro homosexual.' Another respected NR elder—its books editor Frank Meyer, Wills's mentor at the magazine—pleaded with Buckley not to publish the essay. But Buckley was captivated. What Wills had written was quite possibly National Review 's 'finest hour,' he later said. Overruling Meyer, Buckley edited the essay himself; printed it at eight full pages under the title Wills had chosen, 'What Color Is God?'; and made it the cover story. It appeared in May 1963 just after the historic civil-rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama. Americans watched televised footage of firefighters as they aimed fire hoses at children who were then slammed to the pavement, the pressure of the hoses turned so high, The New York Times reported, that the spray 'skinned bark off trees.' At the time, Buckley also efficiently drew on Wills's argument in his own writing about Baldwin. One column restated the argument so closely that it 'suggests some interesting reflections on your conception of editing and/or plagiarism,' Wills protested. But Buckley also honed Wills's nuanced words into the sharp blade of accusation. The Fire Next Time, Buckley wrote, was a violently racist tract—'A Call to Lynch the White God.' None of this deterred Baldwin from agreeing to debate Buckley in early 1965. 'It will be a tough one,' Buckley wrote to a friend. And he had made it no easier by taunting Baldwin in a column only weeks beforehand, calling him the 'Number-1 America-hater.' Buckley had no idea what to expect from the audience he would face at the Cambridge Union. For a recent debate on the Labour Party's 'hypocritical attitude on immigration,' one Labour member of Parliament after another declined to come. The union had held the event anyway, and 200 demonstrators had marched through campus, many carrying banners and placards saying the Conservative speaker was a racist. Forty police officers had been brought in to protect him. American civil-rights leaders, by contrast, had been warmly received in England. In December, when King, en route to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, had stopped over in London to give a sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral—' the first non-Anglican ever allowed in the pulpit ' there, according to King's biographer Taylor Branch—some 4,000 people had turned out to hear him, more than the great church could seat. Cambridge Union debates were held in the evening, preceded by a dinner, with the student leaders as hosts and the invited guests seated on either side of the union's president. Not this time. Baldwin had instead requested to be seated as far as possible from Buckley. He wanted no pre-debate pleasantries. Buckley respected this. He also disliked forced geniality with strong adversaries; it made going after them harder. Baldwin's words were as much sermon as argument. The audience was stunned into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished, after almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute. The union hall that night—Thursday, February 18—was filled to capacity and beyond. 'By eight o'clock, the hall was so jam-packed with students that officials had to set up crash barriers,' the political scientist Nicholas Buccola writes in his 2019 account of the debate, The Fire Is Upon Us. All the benches were taken, and many students sat on the floor. Buckley and Baldwin had to pick their way past them as they were led to the long table at the front of the room. Buckley had two British companions with him—his close friend, the journalist and historian Alistair Horne, and the film star James Mason, who sat high above in the gallery. Baldwin's small entourage sat there too. Hundreds more viewers gathered in nearby rooms with TV screens, making the total audience about 1,000. The BBC had sent a crew for a broadcast. 'I don't think I've ever seen the union so well attended,' said the Tory MP Norman St. John-Stevas, who was there as the station's commentator. To a home audience that had never heard of William F. Buckley, St. John-Stevas explained that he was 'very well known as a conservative in the United States,' smiling as he added, 'I must stress, a conservative in the American sense'—closer, in British terms, to a Manchester-school classical liberal—and 'one of the early supporters of Senator Goldwater.' The topic of the debate called to mind an especially provocative sentence in The Fire Next Time : 'The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power,' Baldwin had written, 'but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.' The motion put up for debate was this: 'The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.' The phrase American dream was one that Buckley seldom, if ever, used except ironically, but he would now be forced to defend it. Baldwin began by saying that, in terms of the Black experience, American dream was an all but meaningless expression. 'Let me put it this way,' he said in what became the most famous words spoken that evening: From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed and for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing, for nothing. The custom at Cambridge Union debates was for audience members to address questions to the speaker, even interrupting to demand a reply. But Baldwin's words were as much sermon as argument—'a highly refined version of soapbox speech,' one of Baldwin's biographers later wrote—even as his description of the capitalist uses of slavery was grounded in historical fact. In 1965, structural racism was a new idea, certainly for this audience, which had been stunned into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished, after almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute. 'The whole of the union standing and applauding this magnificent speech of James Baldwin,' St. John-Stevas excitedly told the BBC audience. 'Never seen this happen before.' All the while, Buckley had been sitting by, writing notes on his yellow pad, thinking, as he later recalled, 'Boy, tonight is a lost cause.' For years to come, he would maintain that the debate had contrasted his exercise in high logic with Baldwin's emotionalism. But many present that day thought otherwise. Baldwin had been careful not to say a word about Buckley, not even to utter his name. He had stood at the podium and spoken as if in a kind of reverie. But Buckley, when his turn came, 'stalked the center debating table like a panther,' The New York Times reported. 'He began in a low monotone, almost a snarl.' From the April 1968 issue: What makes Bill Buckley run And the snarling words were distinctly ad hominem, a direct attack on Baldwin himself and the hypocrisy of his admirers. Baldwin's writings constituted a bitter catalog of American sins, yet no one challenged him. Instead he was 'treated from coast to coast in the United States with a kind of unctuous servitude, which, in point of fact, goes beyond anything that was ever expected from the most servile Negro creature by a southern family.' Baldwin's indictment of America was so sweeping, Buckley continued, that it deserved to be met head-on, which meant granting him no special favors. Baldwin could not be engaged squarely in debate unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man. Unless one is prepared to say to him, 'The fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments that you raise.' The fact that you sit here, as is your rhetorical device, and lay the entire weight of the Negro ordeal on your own shoulders is irrelevant to the argument that we are here to discuss. But it was Buckley who seemed disconnected from the larger context. Wills was soon to denounce (in his new column in the National Catholic Reporter) 'the savage policemen of Mississippi and Alabama' who had been brutalizing people seeking only their constitutional right to vote. Buckley simply reverted to the two-year-old argument from 'What Color Is God?,' which he repeated almost verbatim. 'The gravamen of Mr. Baldwin's charges against America,' Buckley said, is 'not so much that our civilization has failed him and his people, that our ideals are insufficient, but that we have no ideals.' Baldwin had written this in The Fire Next Time and asserted it again in the union, only 'he didn't, in writing that book, speak with the British accents that he used exclusively tonight.' Up to that moment, Baldwin had been almost impassive as Buckley spoke. The BBC camera now captured his look of angry surprise. There was nothing 'British' in Baldwin's accents. He was a practiced and polished speaker, who had gone before many audiences and spoken exactly as he had on this occasion, in elevated tones steeped, like his prose, in the vocabulary and cadences of the King James Bible. Buckley had insinuated that it was a kind of minstrel performance worked up for this British audience. Murmurs of disapproval and loud hissing rose in the hall. Buckley, always attentive to his audiences and their responses, realized he had erred. He tried to recover. He took this debate seriously. He took all debates seriously, often writing out his major statement in advance. Tonight, as always, he had a case to make. He rightly pointed to the logical error, the 'soritic' leap, by which Baldwin connected the 'fanatic' teachings of Paul to the genocide at Dachau. He accurately remarked that other countries had histories of persecution no better than America's. But other realities seemed lost on him. When he acknowledged 'those psychic humiliations which I join Mr. Baldwin in believing are the worst aspects of discrimination,' he cited an incident in The Fire Next Time, when the 13-year-old Baldwin had been walking along Fifth Avenue on his way to the public library, and a policeman had said, 'Why don't you niggers stay uptown where you belong?' But Buckley said nothing about Baldwin's recollection of having been accosted at age 10 by two white police officers, who 'amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem's empty lots.' Flat on his back. This wasn't merely psychic humiliation; it was physical intimidation and threat. 'I have been carried into precinct basements often enough,' Baldwin wrote, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. Those secrets were the secrets of violence committed with impunity. Even now, Buckley seemed unable to grasp this reality of America's racial history—very much alive in the winter of 1965. On the same day that Buckley and Baldwin met in debate, voting-rights demonstrators who'd assembled peacefully in a downtown square in Marion, Alabama, had been sadistically beaten by state troopers. The victims included a Black minister whose skull had been cracked as he knelt in prayer. The police had also attacked an 82-year-old man and his 50-year-old daughter. Both had been hospitalized. When a third member of the family had leaped at the officer beating his mother, the officer had shot him in the stomach. (He died eight days later.) These were the facts putting the promise of the American dream to the test. When the debate ballots were counted, the motion carried 544 to 164, a lopsided defeat for Buckley. 'Baldwin worsted Bill,' Buckley's friend Alistair Horne recalled in 2013. 'He was electric, so wonderfully articulate, and—this is what I think shook Bill—so highly entertaining.' This last would have stung most of all. Buckley had been not just outdebated but outperformed. Soon after, Buckley opened The New York Times and saw almost the entire transcript of the debate printed without permission in the newspaper's magazine. The two combatants now found common cause. Baldwin's lawyer let Buckley know so both could lodge a protest. Playboy had reportedly offered Baldwin as much as $10,000 to publish his remarks. Eventually he and Buckley received token payments of $400 each. The Times article appeared in print on March 7, the day of the voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Bloody Sunday. The Cambridge fiasco might have permanently damaged Buckley's reputation—except there was a second debate with Baldwin, under very different conditions. It happened in New York in late May 1965 on Open End, a talk show moderated by the TV personality and producer David Susskind. The subject was police brutality in big cities. In the South, the violence was plain for all to see—the beatings and killings of people seeking the right to vote. But in the North, the issue was more complex, especially in places such as New York, where rising crime was inextricably bound up with the emergence of white 'backlash politics.' Open End 's format was more favorable to Buckley than the formal Cambridge proceedings had been. The three men were seated and went back and forth for nearly two hours. One columnist described Buckley this time as 'cool, detached, confident,' and in command as he warned that the talented Baldwin was also 'destructive and sullen,' and on a course that would ultimately harm Black people. 'The best fight in town,' the columnist wrote. Less than two weeks later, Buckley called a press conference and confirmed the rumor that had been building for weeks: The 'one man who can think' in the conservative movement declared himself a candidate for mayor of New York City. Buckley lost the election, but it made him a household name—and fed an ambition to reach a broader audience and become a facilitator of discussion rather than a mere combatant. He launched his own TV debate program, Firing Line, in 1966; the guests eventually included the Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton. 'Amazingly, a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism,' the media historian Heather Hendershot later wrote, was broadcasting 'some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power' of that era. National Review had praised Malcolm X's doctrine of self-reliance, and Buckley's own enthusiasm for 'black capitalism' was one reason the National Urban League invited him to join a group of other journalists it sent on a tour of eight cities in 1969. Buckley was impressed by the leaders he met, in particular by a young Chicago organizer, Jesse Jackson. The next year Buckley, who came to see The Fire Next Time as a 'spectacular essay,' wrote an article for Look magazine titled, ' Why We Need a Black President in 1980.' He knew that it would happen eventually and almost lived to see it. Buckley died at age 82 on February 27, 2008, three months before Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination.
Miami Herald
15-05-2025
- General
- Miami Herald
We must protect our historically Black universities and colleges, including FAMU
A couple of weeks ago, I traveled with my godchildren Troy and Cecily Robinson Duffie to Marshall, Texas, for the graduation ceremony of Trinity, their fifth and last child to graduate college. The ceremony took place on the lawn of the historic Wiley University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) established in 1873 — just 10 years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Wiley, founded by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was established to allow 'Negro youth the opportunity to pursue higher learning in the arts, sciences and other professions,' according to the university's history. While we celebrated the milestone in Trinity's life and the history of Wiley, to me it was a celebration of yet another kind, a celebration of Black History. Graduation day was picture-postcard perfect. There wasn't a cloud in the cornflower blue sky and the air had a slight chill, just cool enough to keep us comfortable. As we took our seats among the hundreds of other parents and friends of the graduates, the sound of drumming could be heard, as a dancer performed a ceremonial dance, signaling it was time for the dignitaries, faculty members and the graduates to march into the ceremony. The night before, we attended a baccalaureate service where there was old-fashioned preaching and music from the university's a cappella choir. So, on this graduation morning, I sat, like a wide-eyed child, anticipating more of what I call a traditional Black graduating ceremony with bits and pieces of our history told in songs (mainly Negro spirituals) and a soul-stirring speech from the designated speaker. I wasn't disappointed. But as I watched these latest graduates proudly walk across the stage and into a new world that awaited them, students, faculty and alums in Tallahassee were opposing what they consider a threat to Black history and the history of Florida A&M University. The threat is the potential appointment of Marva Johnson as the university's next president. As of Wednesday, nearly 11,500 people, including current students, alumni, faculty and HBCU supporters nationwide, signed a petition opposing Johnson's appointment, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. She is one of four finalists. At a meet-and-greet session for Johnson Wednesday night in the university's grand ballroom, the crowd, including FAMU alum and Hollywood producer Will Packer, angrily opposed her candidacy, the Democrat reported. The concerns centered on Johnson's political allies — she has served in the administrations of both Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Gov. Rick Scott — and whether she has the academic credentials to lead FAMU. DeSantis has championed the Stop WOKE Act and other measures targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs at universities. Johnson's educational credentials include a bachelor's degree in business administration from Georgetown University, a master's of business administration from Emory University in Atlanta, and a law degree from the Georgia State University College of Law. She is a Black woman who has excelled in the corporate sector — she oversees the lobbying arm of Charter Communications, an internet and cable TV company. Yet, I can understand the opposition against her. We live in a crazy world where it is hard to trust some people, even when they look like me. We are fighting to keep our history — Black history — alive. We first witnessed the blatant banning of books by Black authors — books that told our story, our history — a movement championed by DeSantis and his GOP allies in the Florida Legislature. Then President Donald Trump fired off orders eliminating DEI programs that guaranteed us a level playing field. So, yes, it's hard to trust a person who has ties with a governor who is determined to wipe Black history off the American history slate. I still can't understand the book banning. Not here in America. I realize that some of the stories in banned books are hard to read, even for some Blacks. But they are the stories of our history, America's history, and they need to be preserved. Johnson, a Tampa Bay native who met with FAMU's board of trustees earlier Wednesday, tried to allay the crowd's concerns Wednesday evening, saying she wasn't sent to 'dismantle FAMU,' the Democrat reported. Florida A&M, Wiley University and other HBCUs across the country are the keepers of our history. They were founded during turbulent times for Blacks in America, and it's important to have the right leadership at these fountainheads of knowledge and Black history. Like many other early Black colleges and universities, Wiley opened its doors with 'two frame buildings and an overwhelming desire to succeed in a climate fraught with racism and Jim Crow laws.' So, there I sat on the lawn, part of Wiley's 55 acres, surrounded by the ghosts of the forefathers and mothers who fought for future generations to have a piece of the American dream. Silently, I thanked them, the visionaries who against all odds gallantly fought a good fight to give HBCUs like Wiley a fighting chance. It is because of them, and the generations who came after them, that I was able to sit and watch Baby Trinity walk across the stage as a college graduate.
Miami Herald
09-05-2025
- General
- Miami Herald
Mother's Day brings back memories sad but loving
Mother's Day is a holiday that can conjure up a kaleidoscope of colorful and beautiful memories, or it can bring back memories of almost unbearable sadness. Had she lived, my mom would be 106. She died in 2002, just slept away as her only two children — myself and my brother Adam — and her daughter-in-law Val, sat by her bedside. I was honored to have been her caregiver for nearly seven years before she died. Although this sounds like the beginning of a sad story, it is not. Mom had lived a full life, although not always an easy one. Somehow, with her limited amount of book learning (she only had a ninth-grade education), she always managed to find decent work, refused to be on welfare and reared two children, as a single mom, who never gave her an ounce of trouble. She did it during some of the harshest times for Blacks in America – the Jim Crow era. I am still amazed at how she did it. Mom seemed to be always working. So, at an early age, she taught me how to take care of the home and my brother, who is three years younger. I was in the seventh grade when I started taking home economic classes at Booker T. Washington Jr/Sr High school in Overtown. Mom took advantage of what I'd learned in my cooking class and at age 12, I was tagged to be the cook for our family of three. I didn't mind. I always had a love of cooking. The hardest part about cooking was learning how to cook a good pot of rice. Looking back, there were many times I yearned to be carefree, with seemingly no chores to do, like some of my friends. Yet, Mom had instilled in me such a tremendous sense of responsibility as the 'second lady of the house,' that I simply wanted to the biggest help to her that I could be. I wanted her to be pleased with me, and the way I had followed the instructions she hurriedly doled out to me as she ran out the door to catch the 6 a.m. bus for work. Mom was strict. But she was kind and, at times, very sweet and funny. To me, she embodied the soul of every Negro mother, single or otherwise, who against all odds, found a way to make a decent home to bring up her children. We were poor, but guess what? Mom found a way to keep that a secret from us. She did this by making sure we always had a decent meal on the table and nice clothes to wear. Even when she had to be at work, serving dinner to other families, her instruction to me was simple: 'When dinner is ready, you set the table and you and your brother sit down and eat together like two human beings.' While I didn't always understand what she was trying to teach me, those impromptu lessons as she ran out the door for her bus sure have come in handy over the years. Still, it wasn't always all-work-and-no-play with Mom. She was a natural comedian. The stories she told about her growing up days in Plant City in central Florida kept us in stitches. She could mimic anyone. If she told us a story about the old neighbor who lived near them in Plant City, Mom became that person, so much so that if we closed our eyes, we could almost see him in our living room, walking cane and all. Mom loved to sing and some of my fondest memories are of the three of us singing from the old, red-backed hymn book as we sat around the table in front of the window of our tiny living room in the Liberty Square Housing project. Mom sang lead and I would chime in with my alto. We sang a cappella, songs like, 'Precious Lord,' 'Amazing Grace,' and 'In the Garden.' The three of us singing together was such a special and sweet time that even my brother, who would much rather have been outside playing cowboys with his friends, joined in with his toneless voice, singing as loud as he could. Sometimes the sound of our voices would float out the screen-covered window and passersby would stop for a while to listen. No amount of money could be enough to pay for those sweet moments with our mom. As I mentioned before, Mom was strict. Especially with me. I remember the first time I was allowed to 'take company' (that's what we Blacks called dating back in the 1950s when a girl was allowed to court). Once when my young beau came a' courting, he asked Mom if he could take me to the movie. The Liberty Theater (dubbed The Shack back then) was within walking distance from where I lived. My date had orders to have me home at a certain time, and off we went, hand in hand to the movie theater. The movie was out early. On the way home, there was a teenage dance at the Community Center about two blocks from home. I encouraged my date to stop by for a couple of dances before going home. We were having so much fun dancing, the time slipped away. That is, until I felt a hand on my arm, pulling me away from the dance floor. It was my mom. I'd missed my curfew. That was the night that I just wanted the earth to open for me to jump in and pulled the cover on top. I could hear the laughter from a few of the kids who had witnessed my shame. Mom walked me home chastising me about not keeping my word to be home at a certain time. All I wanted to do was die. But I lived. And when I became a mother, I fully understood Mom's action. I'd brought that shame upon myself by being disobedient. Trust me — it never happened again. And to my date's credit, he never teased me about the incident. Today is bittersweet for me. As I share these happy times with you, a ton of other memories flood my mind as I celebrate another Mother's Day without my beautiful mom. Happy Mother's Day!
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
What the Reconstruction Era Can Teach Us About the Politics of Shame
There are three key elements of the Redemptionist reaction that especially resonate in the present. First and foremost, the rhetoric of their movement insisted that racial equality is an inherently foolish and futile pursuit due to the intractable incompetence and inferiority of people of African descent wherever they are found on the globe. In an 1867 address to Congress, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that 'Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people…wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.' Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna, in the majority opinion for Williams v. Mississippi, an 1898 ruling that narrowed the scope of anti-discrimination claims to the explicit text of law, declared that the Negro race 'by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependencies,' has 'acquired or accentuated' certain habits, temperaments, and characteristics that mark them separate from whites in their carelessness, dishonesty, docility, and lack of 'forethought.' Popularly, the banner of Black incompetence was carried by demeaning depictions in material and theatrical culture, as well as in D.W. Griffith's racist epic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Reconstruction-era Black legislators as 'comically' idiotic, necessitating the violent restoration of white rule. This rhetoric is, unfortunately, resonant with today's attacks on 'DEI,' with critics insisting that efforts to recruit, incorporate, and promote Black talent in higher education, the military, and in many workplaces amount to the dangerous promotion of incompetence. President Donald Trump, for example, immediately and falsely blamed a horrific Washington, D.C. plane crash on DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration, despite no supporting evidence and overwhelming testimony to the contrary from aviation officials. Meanwhile, figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made attacking and dismantling DEI a large part of their public persona, while ignoring legitimate concerns about their unprecedented lack of qualifications for their own roles. High-profile Black leaders like former Harvard president Claudine Gay or former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., have been targeted for defamation and harassment to drive them out of their positions, similarly to Black elected officials and business leaders in the Reconstruction era. The consequence of these campaigns is a revival, from the highest offices of the land, of the Redemptionist lie that common sense should treat Black people as presumptively unfit for positions of authority or public trust. Those who believe otherwise, then, are caricatured as foolish and sentimental. These arguments frequently draw their legitimacy from pseudoscientific racism and the related idea of the backwardness of African diasporic peoples—and expand much further than politics. From Silicon Valley to the media landscape, people in positions of power are reintroducing theories of racial hierarchy under the guise of defending 'free inquiry' or 'realism.' As the Scientific American and The Guardian have documented, a network of actors is actively working to launder eugenics-era thought into legitimacy, cloaked in appeals to genetic science, meritocracy, and market rationality. From Tucker Carlson's monologues, to Elon Musk's offhand remarks about intelligence and heredity, to the administration's executive order against teaching the social construction of 'race,' a new generation of elites is reanimating the old canard that racial inequality is not the legacy of injustice but the reflection of the fundamental inequality of natural 'racial' kinds. Second, we are encouraged to feel shame because of the perversity of consequences. Whatever the good intentions of the last decade or so of racial progressivism, we are told, we have only exacerbated crime, deepened distrust, and stood in the way of economic rationality. Take, for example, the so-called 'Ferguson Effect,' the notion that protests against police brutality demoralize police and exacerbate crime. Just as the reactionary historiography of Reconstruction, led by William Dunning, cast Reconstruction as a misguided, radical experiment in Black suffrage and governance, the Ferguson effect casts protest movements like Black Lives Matter as accelerants of violence and civic decay. Both assert a kind of intuitive 'common sense' that masks deep ideological anxieties. The Dunning historians appealed to the logic of natural racial hierarchy, while proponents of the Ferguson effect draw on a racialized sense of law and order where public safety is presumed to hang precariously on police exercising sweeping authority and compelling broad deference and admiration. In both cases, dissenting scholars have had to work uphill to replace myth with measurement. As social scientists like David Pyrooz and Richard Rosenfeld have shown, the Ferguson effect—when tested across dozens of major cities—fails to reveal a coherent national trend. Rigorous studies consistently find that changes in policing behavior, while real in some places, did not drive national crime patterns, and where proactive policing declined, crime often did not rise at all. Importantly, the best accounts have not only rejected the broad claims of de-policing as a driver of crime but have also emphasized the dangers of clinging to these narratives. The fact that cities like Boston and Baltimore are currently experiencing record homicide declines undercut the notion of a generalized crime wave and affirm something protestors proclaimed: that differences in police approaches matter immensely. Another pillar of Redemptionist rhetoric is the feminization of progressive politics. From Reconstruction to the present, reactionary voices have sometimes attempted to discredit movements for racial justice by portraying their advocates—especially white women—as naïve, sentimental, meddling, and destabilizing. During the postbellum years, white female abolitionists and teachers working with freedpeople were mocked as ' nigger schoolmarms,' accused of spreading delusion and disorder, and often singled out in violent retributions. These women played a vital role in founding schools, advocating suffrage, and supporting Black citizenship, but were often cast by their critics as insubordinate, hysterical, or morally corrupting. This gendered stigma echoed through how Reconstruction itself was characterized—less a serious project of transitional justice and constitutional refounding than a crusade driven by feminine sentimentality run amok. As recent historians have shown, many white women brought genuine moral and pedagogical commitments to the work of abolition and Reconstruction, but navigated a public discourse that portrayed their efforts as irrational and disruptive. Their work, particularly in the South, became one of the earliest battlegrounds where political femininity was equated with moral overreach, excess, and social breakdown. This trope has only persisted today as figures like Christopher Rufo and other conservative intellectuals have revived a strikingly similar line of attack. Writing in City Journal, National Post, and across the digital right, they framed 'wokeness' and progressive racial discourse as symptoms of what they call the 'feminization of American culture.' The rise of DEI and new norms around pedagogy, student activism, and campus protest culture is attributed to a dangerous excess of 'feminine' traits—emotionality, overprotection, inclusivity, and moralistic judgment. This narrative not only ridicules the intellectual and political work of women but also seeks to cast entire movements for justice as self-indulgent and unserious. It is an old trick: to attribute the presence of injustice not to the powerful who perpetuate it, but to the women and marginalized people who criticize it. What makes this rhetoric particularly potent is that it insists on old gender hierarchies as the norm. To understand this history is not merely to lament its repetition, but to arm ourselves with clarity. The reemergence of scientific racism, the delegitimization of Black leadership and achievement, the panic over DEI and protest, the feminization of justice—are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a coherent tradition of backlash, one that knows how to speak the language of realism and reform while advancing the cause of domination. The task, then, is not simply to refute the lies with better data, though that matters. It is to refuse the shame that seeks to make us forget what we glimpsed, however briefly, in the streets in 2020 and beyond: the possibility that this country might confront how far it is from the scale and scope of its promises, and seize upon that reckoning to remake itself. We will either find a way to remember that aspiration without apology. Or, we will watch another moment where the tentative promise of reconstruction curdles and congeals into something genuinely worthy of our collective shame. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His forthcoming book is
