Incredibly to me, near the very beginning of my career as a young journalist, I once talked for a morning with a man named Otto, who at his birth, almost a century earlier, was destined to have become the world’s most powerful figure–emporer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the shaky but still vast great power of central and southern Europe.  In 1912, the year Otto von Habsburg was born, it would have been unimaginable, unthinkable even, that the empire ruled from his future throne–one of the most powerful in human history–would collapse and disappear before the little boy reached even the age of six.  But that was exactly what happened as history, circumstance, inflexibility, malicious ambition, new technology, idiocy, and an arrogant confidence that nothing could truly change the human order as it then existed all conspired to destroy the entire world Otto was being groomed to rule. Millions of ordinary human lives vanished along with it, consumed in the conflagration of the first World War. That destruction also launched the era of human history in which now we live, and one for which very soon we all must once again choose its future. 

 

As a very young reporter at the Arkansas Democrat, I had some conversations with then Gov. Bill Clinton. (Also crossed paths with sad old Orval Faubus, the dying .) I got to know Atlanta’s heroic Maynard Jackson, and for many years sat one floor away from, and often talked with, Andrew Young, the wise if irascible aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’ve encountered Dr. King’s complicated kids too, and Martin III was good enough to visit my home for a Pulitzer Prize party a decade ago. I knew Rep. John Lewis, and even wrote a story about him that made him mad once–not an easy thing to do. Was friendly with Julian Bond. I still am with Bob Moses, one of the greatest living Americans.

 

Among those who came near or achieved the presidency, I’ve had intense diaologue with Jimmy Carter in his post presidency–visiting Atlanta housing projects with him, sitting in his study in Plains, even getting to overhear bits of a phone call in which President Carter scolded President Clinton back in 2008.

It seems like I talked to Michael Dukakis in 1988, but honestly I can’t resurface a memory of it. That was the same year I first observed Al Gore closely, and quickly saw why as smart as he was, the chances were slim that he could make it all the way. More recently, I talked at length with Bernie Sanders. We even shared an aisle on a plane to Vermont, and both fell asleep.

 

Of course, I’ve gotten to know most of all former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.–another figure of awesome capacity and principle who was grotesquely smeared by a mob of vastly lesser figures. (Hopefully we can soon address that in another way.) Through my work with him, I’ve met more than once President Obama, who–whether you like his politics or not–is easily the most gifted and charismatic figure in the current era of American history.

 

Is he Barack Obama? No

Is he Dwight Eisenhower? No.

 

Will he become the kind of inspirational figure (right or wrong) that Ronald Reagan was? I don’t think so.

 

Is he the equivalent, in terms of understanding government and alliances and creative change in the world, of Bill Clinton and even George H.W. Bush? Yes. He is.

 

ANGER IS THE COIN OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S REALM, the fuel for his inspiration. Fear is the only thing he has used effectively in his quest to obtain power, and now the only element of his increasingly unhinged quest to preserve it. We see it growing, among his strongest supporters, every hour every day, as they sense an impending collapse. Unlike Biden, he praises and encourages the violence of his followers, explicitly, over and over again. He genuine believes that the will of the majority of Americans is irrelevant, if it does not award him power and prestige. And just as in those countries where I saw flourishing anger become limitless cruelty, violence which is not extinguished only inflames more and more violence and provocation. Violence and the prospect of it is Trump’s addiction, and his reliance on it will only grow with time.

 

The post Which America Do We Want? appeared first on Slavery By Another Name.

When I was a Boy Scout in Leland, Mississippi, my patrol in Troop 42 called itself “the Rebels” during 1976. I still have locked in a trunk somewhere little wooden blocks I painted with the names of each scout imposed over a crude image of the Confederate battle flag–a wall decoration of some sort for the scout hall. I was fascinated by the Confederacy, the Civil War, the rebel monuments on every courthouse lawn, the headstone of my ancestor Morris Foshee, with its inscription of his unit, the 47th Alabama infantry.

For a southern boy raised in the wet hothouse of what I call neo-Confederate, nostalgic triumphalism, it is astonishing to see the swift political moves in South Carolina to lower the Confederate battle emblem in the wake of the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.  All the more so, when compared to the decades of intransigence about Confederate symbols in the South and among a certain lethargic group of white Americans everywhere.  How could this change happen in the blink of eye–if it does–when there was such fierce resistance and seeming fealty in the recent past to that striking blue cross and 13 stars on a red field ?

It is a mistake however, to interpret the resilience of the Confederate battle flag as “popularity” among large numbers of people, or as something that triggers outpourings of affection or other positive emotions.  It is wrong even to suggest that support for public display of the flag is even closely related–as it was for me in childhood–to some fond remembrance of the past, or even a sentimental connection to soldiers of long ago who sacrificed for a cause they believed in. No, only the tiniest numbers of southerners with an attachment to the emblem of the Confederate revolt have even a vague awareness of their familial connections to the Civil War, or even faintly what life looked like in the sweaty, un-airconditioned, drawling, poverty stricken, overalls bedecked, brutish farmboy landscape of the pre-1960s South. Only the most dedicated sad-sack members of the Sons of the Confederacy or unshaven faux intellectuals at loony fringe groups like the “League of the South,” or naive little boys in the 1970s, can even tell you that the “Rebel flag” began as a symbol of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and gradually came to identify in the eyes of all Americans the entire white southern uprising to defend slavery. Even fewer white southerners can tell their own family histories–like that of my great-great-grandfather Foshee, and his years as an obscure private under that banner in the 47th Alabama.

No, the seeming immovability of that symbol over the past half century has been about something very different from an appreciation of actual history.  The modern resurrection and defense of the flag was wholly a product of the civil rights struggles since the 1950s, and the need for a rallying point for defenders of segregation and apologists for white discrimination and white privilege.  The flag wasn’t even flying in most southern states until the 1960s, and then it was hoisted with the explicit intention of telling the rest of the country, finally emerging from its own racial dark ages, to go to hell. And wherever that flag was invoked, it was accompanied in those days by explicit defenses of the most virulent racism and ethnic hate.

There was no sugar coating what it meant. The legislators and state officials who brought the battle flag out of the closet in the 1960s were the exact same people who openly praised the murders of civil rights workers, openly called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a communist ape, openly predicted the “mongrelization” of the white race if segregation ended, publicly said science proved the mental inferiority of African-Americans.  The flag was as open a symbol of violent oppression of black people and resistance to democracy, as the German swastika was the symbol of fascism and a desperate desire to murder the Jews of Europe.  Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who said ending segregation would be to “drink from the cup of genocide,” knitted together all the imagery, meanings and vile intentions in September 1962, in a 15-word speech at an Ole Miss football game. Standing in a Nuremberg-esque sea of Confederate battle banners, Barnett declared: “I love Mississippi. I love her people, our customs. I love and respect our heritage.” The next day, thousands of white men attacked federal marshals protecting the first black student to enroll at the university. It took 30,000 federal troops to restore calm.

The private letters among carriers of the Confederate battle flag back then are most remarkable in one way: those men actually believed the heinous things they were saying in public. And they acted under a misguided belief that most of the rest of white America, actually shared those views deep down.  They honestly believed the Civil Rights Movement was an aberration–a course deviation caused by one spectacularly gifted black orator, his weak-bellied liberal supporters, and, it surely must be, his secret controllers in the Soviet Union.  They truly believed all that for a good reason: just 15 or 20 years earlier, they would have been right. In the 1940s, white Americans in every part of the country–including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, most members of his cabinet and the majority of the Supreme Court–agreed that almost all black people were naturally inferior to white people.  When southern politicians resurrected Confederate emblems in the 1960s, it was part of a genuine, if gigantically mistaken, belief that white Americans everywhere could be led or inspired back to their own past racist instincts.

Fortunately, that effort failed. Spectacularly.

The refusal to take the flag back down over the 50 years since then has been simply this: an effort to falsely obscure the explicitly racist nature of those leaders–and white southerners and lots of other white Americans generally–in that two-decade long extended moment of national decision when white southern men, women, teachers, preachers, politicians, police, judges, doctors, lawyers, mechanics and every other stripe overwhelmingly failed. Faced with the greatest question of social conscious they would ever confront, they failed as Americans. They failed as Christians. They failed as believers in freedom. They failed as parents and grandparents. And for the next two generations or more, it became important among white southerners to conceal or excuse that abject failure.

As it became apparent that the nation collectively rejected the immoral, backward views of the white South, it became necessary to “window dress” what had happened. The argument hadn’t been about white supremacy, they began to claim, it was about the government getting too big. The objection wasn’t about having black and white kids in school together, it was about violence on campus, they said. They hadn’t meant to suggest that all black boys are inclined to rape, only that teen pregnancy and “welfare queens” are not good. They hadn’t meant to suggest that the people whose labor they had exploited for 300 years were in fact lazy and incompetent. And  yes, as Gov. Barnett told you in 1962, the Confederate battle flag wasn’t about suppressing black people, or defending slavery, or endorsing the violence of the Klan. It was about bravery, honor, appreciation of genteel women, limited government and constitutional principles.

It was about “heritage not hate.”

The reason the tide may be turning against this long misuse of the Confederate flag is because, thankfully, enough time and generations have passed that the number of Americans who know anything about the flag or have any legitimate interest in it is getting smaller and smaller. The architects of the flag propaganda of another time have, presumably in the wisdom of god, been taken from the earth, and those of us who remain didn’t listen well.  It’s not just young African-Americans who don’t know as much as they should about the abuses suffered by their forebears; hardly any young Americans are interested in all that unpleasant past–especially now that so many of them are dating or coveting members of the other race, listening to Hip Hop and seeing a black man in the White House. One way or another,  it has been absorbed that black people achieving some semblance of equality did not in fact cause the earth to consume itself in fire.

So the only people today who exhibit the Confederate flag–other than state governments, ironically, and a few holdout private schools–are in fact white supremacists, loutish rednecks, a has-been country music singer or two, neo-Nazis, and pathetically undereducated fools. Oh, and yes, people who make meth in broken down trailer houses.

That wasn’t the case as recently as the debate in Georgia 20 years ago that led to the removal of the battle emblem from that state flag, or the statewide vote on changing the flag in Mississippi at about the same time. (It failed–with even African-American voters supporting the flag in a twisted expression of home state “loyalty.”) Even as late as those events in the 1990s, there were still a lot of aging white southern males around who had grown up feeling, even after the dust had settled, that the civil rights movement had been at a minimum “unfair” to whites and wrongly impugned them and their fathers before them.

Even if polite about race in public, they were still offended by and quietly seething at the suggestion that poverty and other difficulties of African-Americans were the fault of past and present white racism–instead of laziness as they had always believed. They still needed to believe their teachers were truthful when they taught the historical hoax that enslaved people actually liked slavery in the 1850s, and were happy to have been brought to America–saved from cannibalism, paganism and bestiality. That generation of southern men were not generally supporters of the Ku Klux Klan or racial violence, but at their core they enjoyed the idea that the continued use of the flag bothered the people who so bothered them. They didn’t care a whit–or generally even know a whit–about the true history of the flag or their own connections to the slave-holders rebellion, but they relished how this antiseptic and increasingly invoked “heritage” propaganda innocently explained the battle flag and could be used to goad the critics they so despised.

But time marched on those gentlemen. Those aging white males are no longer the overwhelmingly dominant cohort in the southern states–just as those white voters are declining in political control of the South. Hence Virginia, Florida and North Carolina are presidential battleground states. Georgia is in play. Not many people are so obtuse still to believe that the declining performance educationally and economically of white males in rural America, especially the South, is because of affirmative action or because black people today are allowed to go to high school, and to vote.

We all understand pretty clearly now that a Dylann Roof actually has to stand on his own two feet.  He can’t depend on an entrenched system of silent abuse and unspoken conspiracy to prevent women or African-Americans from seeking the same entry level job that Dylann might have desired.  He can’t count on “heritage” and tradition to make sure that the majority of the black kids in his town can’t get an education sufficient to seek upwardly mobile employment–as heritage and customs guaranteed for 150 years. The Dylann Roofs of the world have to actually compete now. And for the first time in at least a century, they actually have to be men now–not just members of  cowardly mobs protecting themselves with violence and intimidation, and always anonymously.  We all understand that now, at least on some level.  The government isn’t going to ensure your success by openly harming black people for you anymore, white man. You’re actually on your own now. The petty complaints and invented aggrievements of that generation–blaming black people for all their woes–make sense to a smaller and smaller group of other people now. Even the sons of the men who still feverishly insisted on that pitiful, self-emasculating logic 20 and 30 years ago increasingly don’t get their own dads anymore.

It’s not dissimilar to what happened with gay marriage: at some point the hollow nature of ridiculously inflexible positions simply begins to be obvious–especially when confronted by some event so clearly horrifying and indefensible as what happened in Charleston.

That’s the reality that Dylann Roof–and the rest of his scraggly, stupid ilk–are truly reeling from. Their own inadequacy. Their own failures. The slow disappearance of the certainty that all the white men will look out for all the other white men first–and somehow still save some kind of place even for the broken, intellectual runts like him.  The Dylann Roofs of American today instinctively realize that their day is past.  He never even had that day. They see white girls at school making the very rational choice to prefer over them black boys who are actually going somewhere. They discover that the police are willing to arrest them too for their petty drug schemes–and that harsh sentencing laws will wreck their misbegotten lives too.

Even the people that the Dylann Roofs once imagined might be allies now profess politics in which white losers like him–along with everyone else–are on their own. The government isn’t here to help anymore.  There is no certainty. Just being white isn’t good enough, Dylann.

So a Dylann Roof lashes out in the perverse way that such an inadequate, violence-intoxicated mind can invent, swathed in the ideas and imagery so intertwined with the Confederate battle flag today. Yet, his rampage becomes a renunciation of whatever little honorable character attached to that symbol long ago.  When my great-great grandfather and the rebels fighting with him to dismantle the United States charged up the hill called Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, in a decisive moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, they and their flag made clear who they were and the wrongs they were fighting for. We can at least give them that. And a third of the regiment of 1,500 fell on the battlefield that day, repulsed, thankfully, by soldiers defending the America we live in now.

Perhaps the Confederate battle flag did represent some sort of misguided valor back then. But no more.

Today, it stands for Dylann Roof, a wretch unable even to meaningfully articulate his anger at being required to take responsibility for himself, enraged at being forced to compete and survive in a world finally glimmering with at least a potential for equality. It stands for a coward like him, stripped of the protection of the lynching mobs that would have carried his flag. It stands for a loser without the spine to tell the people he found at Emanuel church who he truly was or what he truly believed–until he already had his gun trained on them. It stands for people like him who lie–by omission or commission–about their intentions. It stands for a murderer who could only savage the defenseless–who was so blind and terrified by his own emptiness that he would assault the only people who actually wanted to help him.

What bloodless shell of a person would choose to fly such a flag now? Finally, all who are willing can see that.

The post Why must the Confederate banner come down?<BR/> Because it is the battle flag of white cowards,<BR/> And those angry that white privilege is ending appeared first on Slavery By Another Name.

Nicholas Kristof gets it right in his NY Times column today, about how hard it is for us white folks in America to admit what enormous advantages we were born with because of the abuses of the ancestors of people who don’t look like us. He is generous to mention my book, in company of superb work by Orlando Patterson, Charles Blow and others.

As I’ve said and written thousands of times, it’s not about all of us alive today with paler complexions being made to feel guilty, or other people being given a big check. Instead, it’s about what kind of society we’d like our children and grandchildren to live in. It’s not unlike the flawed but brilliant Founders of our country, who recognized many of the failures and tyranny of the system that nonetheless had created them and in many ways was the envy of all humanity at the time. They nonetheless imagined a yet better future, confronted the failures of the status quo at great personal risk, then invented the kind of government and institutions that they believed could achieve their visions. We have the responsibility in our time to do the same–to recognize the flaws in a system that is still the envy of the world, and be willing to imagine a future that improves upon it, and what resources and mechanisms must be in place for the most creative society in history to build that world. If there is any kind of American exceptionalism, it is our capacity to do that as a diverse and varied single nation. 

In the days ahead, the news from Ferguson, Missouri and other places is going to be upsetting. People of similar minds and hearts are going to be in conflict over the decision of the grand jury there–whatever that decision is. Almost certainly, the news is going to be neither a sweeping criminal indictment of the policeman at question, nor an exoneration of the police–or of the young man whose life was lost. No one is going to be satisfied–because we have a become a country where these questions cannot be sorted out in clean or satisfactory ways. How American citizens react to that conclusion is unpredictable, contradictory and worrisome. 

No matter what happens, we must ask why do we continue to find ourselves in this paralyzed and tortured place of uncertainty so often, and for reasons we almost always cannot untangle. We must be open to designing a future in which these things no longer are a fact of American life.

If nothing else, back to Kristoff’s column, white people must bring an end to this  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/when-whites-just-dont-get-it-part-4.html cross-generational behavior of denial regarding the consequences of our ancestors’ racially motivated behavior, and cease–dear god, please cease–the decades of whining whenever we are asked to face reality.

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The post Is President Obama truly ready to release thousands of prisoners? appeared first on Slavery By Another Name.

Published in The Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2013

by Douglas A. Blackmon

One of the first inmates to benefit from the Obama administration’s new, less stringent guidelines on the early release of federal prisoners is the 87-year-old father of one of four African American girls killed in the infamous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.

U.S. District Court Judge Lynwood Smith of Birmingham, Ala., signed an order Thursday releasing Christopher McNair, a former county commissioner in the state who has served just over half of a five-year-sentence for accepting $140,000 in bribes while in office official.

The order came in response to a request from Justice Department lawyers earlier in the day seeking McNair’s release on medical grounds. By nightfall, the inmate had been released from a federal prison hospital in Minnesota, and his lawyer was arranging to fly him back to Alabama.

The carefully choreographed series of legal maneuvers, came after a quiet, years-long campaign by some prominent African-Americans and civil rights leaders in support of clemency for McNair. On May 24, McNair’s wife made a personal plea to President Obama at an Oval Office signing ceremony for legislation posthumously awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the four murdered girls, according to others present at the event.

Attorney General Eric Holder, accompanied by his wife Sharon Malone – whose older sister integrated the University of Alabama in 1963 – also attended the White House ceremony. Holder was deputy attorney general when the federal investigation into the Birmingham church bombing was reopened during the Clinton administration.

A spokesman for the department said the recommendation to commute McNair’s sentence was made by the federal Bureau of Prisons and “based solely” on new federal rules aimed at making it easier for prisoners in declining health to seek early release. More than 30 inmates have applied for similar sentence reductions since some guidelines were first loosened in April, and McNair would be the seventh set free since June, according to the department.

The Justice Department said McNair hasn’t been treated differently than other inmates, and that the timing of his release during a week of commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington was a coincidence. However, officials acknowledged Holder’s interest in McNair’s situation and said he received at least two updates on the review this summer. After prisons officials concluded that McNair should be released a few weeks ago, the attorney general indicated that he agreed with that decision, one official said.

The White House said President Obama took no steps to influence the review after the conversation with McNair’s wife, Thelma “Maxine” Pippen McNair, and that Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to the president, subsequently told her that McNair’s situation had to be evaluated through normal Department of Justice channels.

McNair’s release adds a coda to one of the most searing and paradoxical narratives of the civil rights era. The KKK dynamite attack, carried out just weeks after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and three 14-year-olds at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and helped galvanize national support for the civil rights movement.

McNair, a photographer who captured images of King, the integration standoff at the University of Alabama and other key moments at the height of Birmingham’s racial turmoil, emerged as an influential local civil rights figure, becoming one of the first black candidates elected to the Alabama legislature in modern times and eventually served as a county commissioner from the 1980s to 2001. During his time in office, the federal investigation into the 1963 bombing was reopened, leading to convictions and imprisonment of two Klansmen involved in the killings.

McNair’s fall from grace came after a conviction in 2006 for accepting $140,000 in bribes related to contracts for a massive sewer construction project. After appealing the conviction, he entered a federal medical prison in Rochester, Minn., in 2011.

The years long efforts to win clemency for McNair, beginning even before he had reported to prison, caused some heartburn among critics who said a tragedy unrelated to his crimes shouldn’t qualify him for a dispensation from punishment.

Supporters said McNair’s contributions to civil rights and his personal loss in 1963 should count for something in considering his situation.

“Rather than being a bitter old man and leaving Alabama, which he could have done, what he and his wife did was stay here and try to make this place a little better,” said former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who prosecuted the two Klansmen after the bombing case was reopened and later became McNair’s defense attorney.

“I would just appeal to people’s sense of compassion,” said Lisa McNair, one of two other daughters in the family. “He’s an elderly man. He made a mistake and he paid for it in more ways than people really know.”

She said her father is suffering from a variety of medical ailments that have worsened since his imprisonment.

McNair’s wife made her plea to Obama after the White House ceremony on May 24 ended. As the president embraced her to say goodbye, McNair, who is 85 years old and also in declining health, rose from her chair, and then in a whisper asked if he could do anything to help her husband, according to others in the room.

McNair attended the White House ceremony in May, and said in an interview this week that her mother, Thelma “Maxine” Pippen McNair, requested a moment with the president to ask Obama if he could do anything to help her husband.

“He was not totally familiar with the situation, but he was gracious enough to respect her and say that he would look into it,” said Lisa McNair, who was present. “It was sweet of him to do that.”

The White House in 2011 denied a request for clemency from McNair, and it has taken no action on a second clemency request filed earlier this year. If U.S. District Court Judge Lynwood Smith approves the government’s motion today, the request for presidential clemency becomes moot and McNair could be released within hours, according to his lawyer and federal officials.

The release of McNair may also please critics who have accused the Obama administration of doing little to address the issue of mass incarceration, especially of African-Americans, despite campaigning on promises to deal with the issue.

During an August 12 speech to the American Bar Association, Holder said the Justice Department was relaxing standards for granting “compassionate release” to some sick and elderly federal prisoners who had served a substantial portion of their sentence and posed no threat of violence.

That move followed an initial round of changes to the compassionate release program made after a report in April by the Justice Department’s independent Inspector General criticizing the Bureau of Prisons for having unclear and inconsistent standards for evaluating prisoners’ eligibility for release. Those rule changes that opened the door for McNair’s possible release this week, Justice officials said.

During earlier efforts to get McNair out of prison, one of the most fierce opponents was Birmingham lawyer Donald Watkins, who wrote the government saying McNair’s corrupt acts injured thousands of people in Alabama and that he should get no special treatment regardless of past tragedy.

However, after the order to cut McNair’s sentence was entered on Thursday, even Watkins — moved by the image of an increasingly feeble old man behind bars—said perhaps it was time for him to be set free.

“If in fact he qualifies for compassionate release based on Department of Justice guidelines,” Watkins said. “Then I have no objection to the release of an 87 year old man from prison.”

Endit

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By Douglas A. Blackmon

One of the most striking results of the vote on Amendment 1, which was approved by Georgia voters on Tuesday and creates an independent commission to authorize public charter schools in the state, is the absolutely extraordinary level of support received from African-American voters.

In the 20 Georgia counties where African-Americans make up half or more of the population, the amendment was approved by 61% of all voters and in 14 of those 20 counties. (In two of the other six counties, the amendment still got 49% of the vote; in the other four, support ranged from 42-44%).  In the 13 counties where more than half of Georgia’s three million black citizens live, the margin of support was even higher: 62% approval.

The bottom line: Georgia’s black counties overwhelmingly desire dramatic new alternatives to the conventional school systems that have failed them for more than a century.

That level of support flatly contradicts one of the flimsiest canards used to criticize Amendment 1—and charter schools in general. That is: the idea that somehow charter schools end up hurting minority or poorer students while disproportionately helping white and middle class children. The actual performance of charter schools in Georgia has always defied such claims. African-American students and all children living in urban areas with failed conventional public schools, like Atlanta, have benefited far more from charters than any other groups.

That reality of the vote is even more remarkable when plotted across a map of Georgia. Amendment 1 was overwhelming approved in populous areas like Atlanta, Savannah and Macon—where a new generation of residents from all social and ethnic backgrounds want an eclectic, diverse, “city” life but where the archaic system of local school board control of public education has been a sustained failure for decades. The amendment also received huge support in places like Cherokee County, where the local school board in recent years has been perhaps the most hostile to all charter schools—and any kind of meaningful school reform—of any location in Georgia. The monopoly so long held by chronically failing institutions like those is what Amendment 1 will now challenge.

The support of Amendment 1 among African-Americans is also notable against the backdrop of the Georgia Supreme Court decision in May 2011 that struck down as unconstitutional a previous version of the state charter commission. That ruling on a lawsuit organized by school boards that oppose all charter schools led directly to the campaign for Amendment 1. In the 2011 ruling, the Supreme Court ignored some substantive issues around state funding that in truth needed judicial scrutiny, and instead struck down the old commission using a cruelly naïve logic that would have been comical if it had not been so nauseatingly ironic. The court reached all the way back to Georgia’s defunct constitution of 1877–a white supremacist document passed expressly to end the brief period of true citizenship enjoyed by formerly enslaved African-Americans after the Civil War–and cited as the basis of their ruling against the charter school commission the very constitutional article that first mandated racially segregated schools in Georgia.

How richly appropriate then, that African-American voters in Georgia used the ballot box to renounce the state Supreme Court’s absurdist logic. A total of more than 805,000 “yes” votes (out of a total of 2.1 million statewide in favor of the amendment) were cast in the counties with the largest number of black voters. That includes DeKalb (54% African-American), where the amendment passed with 64% of the vote; and Fulton (43% African-American), where it was approved by 66%.

And where did Amendment 1 get the absolute highest level of support: in 66% black Clayton County, the poster child for abominable school boards, where the system lost its accreditation as a result of staggering dereliction by the elected board. African-American families in Clayton have been in open revolt—ousting some school officials at the polls, moving to nearby jurisdictions with better schools and mounting immense pressure for improvements.

Voters in Clayton gave the charter school amendment a stunning 71% approval.  That says it all.

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President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney—along with their myriad surrogates, order advisors and official and unofficial campaign wingmen—worked deep in the final night of the contentious 2012 campaign spinning predictions for the outcome of today’s election, online preparing for the blame game that will follow bitter disappointment certain for millions who vote for the losing candidate, patient and making a frantic final scramble for votes.

For months, this race was described as a grueling duel between candidates who each were viewed less than enthusiastically by even their own base of supporters—a grinding battle of attrition by two flawed and not-so-inspiring men. Yet in the last days and hours of the campaign, something very different appeared to be happening. As Romney, Obama and their allies raced through a whirlwind of appearances across the key battleground states, the campaign transformed as they were by raucous crowds of often staggering size.

Romney closed his day in New Hampshire before more than 12,000 ecstatic supporters. Earlier, the Republican made a swift visit to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, part of a last ditch effort to put in play the 20 electoral votes held by a state long assumed to be solidly in the Democratic column. He was greeted by a crowd of 30,000, according to local reporters.

Obama finished the night in Iowa, in an emotional gathering before 20,000 during which, in the style of his late-campaign partner, former President Bill Clinton, he reportedly shed a single tear.  Earlier, the president spoke to 20,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin. That was on the heels of a Virginia rally late Saturday with a crowd of more than 24,000 people. (Notably, the other most recent ex-president, Republican George W. Bush, remained to the last hour as he has been throughout this election year—completely invisible.)

On both sides of the race, advocates for the candidates made dramatic claims that the huge gatherings of supporters and other signs demonstrated that the electorate was breaking their direction—that victory was certain.  Michael Barone, an editorial writer for the conservative Washington Examiner, pronounced that Romney was on his way to a stunning 315 electoral vote victory. That tally included a sweep of not just both Florida and Virginia (where polls have show the candidate with razor thin leads), but also in most states where surveys put him meaningfully behind—Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The president’s chief political advisor, David Axelrod, bluntly countered those and similar “weird theories” during a stop in Wisconsin.  “We’re going to win the electoral vote and we’re going to win the popular vote,” Axelrod said. “We’re very, very confident.”

The last final rounds of independent polling in the race continued to show an astonishingly close election, but also suggested that Romney in fact faced growing obstacles as election day arrived.  There was little movement in all late polls, but where there was any, nearly all of it shifted toward Obama—including a potentially decisive movement back toward the president by female voters.

Early Monday, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll put the president ahead in critical Ohio by a six-point margin, 51-45. A Washington Post daily tracking poll released later in the day gave Obama a two point edge, 50-48, in nationwide polling—a small but dramatic shift after weeks of surveys showing a virtual dead heat. The New York Times’ celebrated number cruncher, Nate Silver, calculated that based on his analysis of all polls, Obama’s likelihood of reelection was above 92%.

Republican groups—particular ones affiliated with some tea party organizations–arguably mounted the party’s most ambitious effort in decades to attract conservative black voters in 2012. The strategy was that in a tightly contested election, convincing even a sliver of African-American voters to return to the Republican coalition that virtually all black voters were a part of until the 1930s could potentially change the outcome of the race. A coalition of black pastors traveled the country calling on other minority clergymen to denounce Obama for his shift to support gay marriage—a position historically opposed by a large majority of black voters. FreedomWorks, one of the largest national organizations affiliated with the tea party movement, helped finance extensive outreach efforts aimed at socially conservative African-Americans, including production of a feature length film titled “Runaway Slave” that toured cineplexes across the U.S. in recent months.

But in the final stage of the campaign, there were growing signs that little erosion had occurred in black support for the president. After an initial dip in support for the president among African-Americans immediately after his gay marriage announcement, polls in critical states showed black support return to levels essentially equivalent to 2008. Surveys by Public Policy Polling in North Carolina found that over time, many more black voters shifted to support of gay marriage after the president changed his position than turned against Obama because of it. Many black voters also said they were infuriated by attacks by Congressional Republicans on Attorney General Eric Holder and comments in by Romney last summer to an NAACP national meeting.

In narrow margin states where a large population of African-American voters could be decisive to the outcome—Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio—the Obama campaign unleashed massive get out the vote efforts in recent days. Focused on predominantly black colleges and African-American barber and beauty shops, the push reached tens of thousands of voters. “We tell them their vote counts,” said Tiara Moore, a 23-year-old graduate student at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., after a day of canvassing on campus. “People fought for this. Died for it. And you’re just going to sit in your classroom.” Social issues like gay marriage, she said, were irrelevant. “We talk about healthcare and student loans.”

Across the country, huge numbers of Americans voted early—reaching more than 45 million, or a third of all votes likely to be cast. In Florida, 4.4 million had voted by Monday morning, slightly more of them Democrats than Republicans. In Ohio, the total number of early ballots reached 1.6 million, with long lines and record level voting in some counties right to the end. The campaigns quarreled through interviews and talk shows over whether those numbers worked to the advantage of Romney or Obama, but the numbers were indisputable that voter enthusiasm had not plummeted. In North Carolina, where Obama won the state by fewer than 15,000 votes in 2008, the number of early votes approached 3 million, with 48 percent of them coming from Democrats and 32 percent from registered Republicans. Obama partisans said tens of thousands more advance ballots had been cast in Ohio counties won by the president in 2008 than in counties carried that year by Sen. John McCain—and that large majorities of the early and late-registering voters were women, minorities and young people. Those are all groups in which late polling showed strong leads for the president. Advisors to Romney scoffed at those suggestions.

Both campaigns also appeared to be competing for “most-grueling” finale prize, as they and their surrogates appeared in a dizzying number of locations. Each candidate was said to have logged 6,000 or more miles of travel in the final episode of the race. An Obama insider circulated a data sheet that read like the racing sheets on a thoroughbred horse. The president had visited Ohio 22 times in 2012; Vice President Joe Biden 11 times; First Lady Michelle Obama 8 times; More than 21,000 volunteers had visited 828,000 voters over the past weekend.

In news stories Monday, Romney campaign officials said they had matched the president’s vaunted get out the vote machine step by step, sign by sign, and door knocker by door knocker.  Now let the votes be counted.

Douglas A. Blackmon is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and formerly senior national correspondent and bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, contributing editor of The Washington Post, and a senior fellow in presidential studies at the University of Virginia. 

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As two of the founders of Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, buy the second charter school to open in Atlanta, capsule 10 years ago this fall, we have spent a lot of time considering the arguments in favor of and against Amendment 1—the proposed change to the Georgia constitution that if passed on Tuesday would allow for the re-establishment of an appointed state commission with the power to create charter schools.

Our personal conclusion: We support Amendment 1.

We’ve heard good people—including friends and allies whose right to make their own decisions regarding this we respect 100 percent–say they support “some” charter schools but oppose Amendment 1 because it’s going “too far,” is “too corporate” or gives “too much power” to the state. We know those views are truly sincere and well-intentioned. We share some of the misgivings.

But we also believe that many people don’t realize how precarious all charter schools are in Georgia right now—and what a serious threat that is to all of us who believe in the importance of diverse public schools serving every family from every background.

The three biggest arguments we’ve heard against Amendment 1 are this:

• First, that charter school proponents already have an “appeal” process to the state board of education if they are not given a fair hearing by a local school board;
• Second, that approving this amendment would mean less funding for conventional public schools;
• Third, that this gives the state “too much power” over public education and takes away the local control of local school boards.

Based on our experience over the past decade, all three of those arguments appear flatly incorrect.

• First, under the “appeal” to the state board of education allowed under current law, the best that a charter school organizer can hope for is to be approved as a “special” school receiving just a fraction of the funding that conventional public schools receive. Schools like those are doomed to fail.
• Second, the only way that additional charter schools meaningfully divert funds from other schools is if they attract back to public education children who are not currently attending public schools. In a state where tens of thousands of children—more than 100,000 in Atlanta alone—have abandoned public schools, the idea of convincing a new generation of students and their families to return to public education is a GOOD thing. To argue otherwise is to accept all of the worst trends in public education over the past 50 years.
• Third, and finally, how can anyone argue that the system of local school boards has been a good thing? Over the last 20 years. Suburban school boards have openly encouraged white flight from the city and resisted reform ferociously. The city school system continues—despite the valiant efforts of some who have tried to turn things around—to post abysmal academic performance and graduation rates, and is today most famous for Atlanta’s ignominious cheating scandal. What could possibly be the argument for continuing to give that system of governance total control of all public schools?

In our minds, what is even more important than any of those arguments is this: A tremendous attack is already underway that threatens the existence of ALL charter schools. It began when the old state charter school commission was struck down by the state Supreme Court last year—proving that for charter schools to thrive they cannot exist purely on the whims of local school boards. This is why the education policy of President Barack Obama calls for the creation of “alternative authorizers”—like the one Amendment 1 would establish–of charters in every state.

THE ATTACK ON CHARTER SCHOOLS:

The ruling against the commission was in response to a lawsuit initiated by a few school boards that oppose the existence of all charter schools. Since that decision, the state Department of Education and many local school districts have already been recalculating formulas for funding in ways that have slashed millions of dollars from charter schools. It isn’t just that the bad economy has hurt everyone. Instead, local school systems have attempted to balance their budgets by disproportionately cutting funding for charter schools, diverting that money to non-charter schools and to make up shortfalls stemming from the systems’ poor financial practices in the past. Already, charter schools have had to band together to hire lawyers to fight some of these clearly unfair efforts.

If Amendment 1 fails, these attacks will accelerate. It will become vastly more difficult for new charter schools to be created in Georgia. And all existing charter schools in the state almost certainly will face a new barrage of obstacles when it is time to renew their charters. During the campaign over Amendment 1, local school leaders have repeatedly made it clear that they don’t even view charter schools as being public schools. They want to see all independent charter schools disappear. Based on past history, that attack will ultimately include going after well-established, high-performing, beloved schools such as Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School. It will be up for renewal in just three years.

To fully understand the importance of re-establishing the charter school commission, you have to look at the history of schools like the one we helped establish. It currently has generally good relations with Atlanta Public Schools, and there are many APS administrators who are committed to working in supportive ways with charter schools. We deeply respect those individuals and believe in them.

OUR EXPERIENCE BEFORE THERE WAS A COMMISSION:

But it wasn’t always that way. When we began working with a group of neighbors to create Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School back in the late 1990s, there was no charter school commission, and there were hardly any charter schools in Georgia. When we approached the administration of former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall with the idea of taking over the decrepit and underperforming elementary school in Grant Park that the system had announced they would soon abandon, she and others made it clear to us that our efforts were unwelcome. When we said we believed we could reconnect our neighborhood to the school and convince large numbers of families to reconsider public education, they blew us off. When we pressed ahead, APS fought our success tooth and nail—going to almost any length to prevent the creation of the school, and after it was established doing everything possible to shut us down. Administrators flagrantly denied funding the school was clearly entitled to. When our building burned catastrophically in 2003 during the first year of operation, APS illegally contracted for bulldozers to come in and remove what was left of the building (without even notifying us). APS lawyers worked bitterly to block us from receiving insurance funds we were entitled to get for reconstruction, and at the same time notified us that our charter was going to be terminated for failure to immediately rebuild. That’s no exaggeration. It was that bad.

We overcame those efforts at sabotage, miraculously. Our neighborhood banded together, rebuilt anyway and persevered. Dynamic and talented teachers began flocking to the school with their resumes, and our students began posting some of the highest scores in the city. (Without cheating.) As early charter schools like ours succeeded, though, metro Atlanta school districts still didn’t embrace them. Instead, they began adopting policies designed to make it virtually impossible for more charter schools to be established. There was no state charter commission then, so local school boards had complete control over the approval of new schools. By 2007, things were so bad that metro Atlanta school districts rejected almost every new charter school proposed that year—often on the most specious grounds. That wave of denials led directly to the state legislature voting to create a charter school commission in 2008 with the power to overrule rejections by local boards, and to fully fund those schools.

Only after that did the Atlanta board of education and other local school systems truly begin working in good faith with charter school groups. Soon APS had created a rigorous but completely professional system for considering applications. It accepted convincing proposals for high-quality new schools—such as Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School’s expansion into the middle school grades several years ago—and rejected applications that couldn’t make the grade. Serious charter school advocates like us applauded when the commission shot down inferior plans. Many other districts—though not all–took similar steps.

During the two years that the charter commission existed, there was no avalanche of poor performing new charter schools—as some opponents of Amendment 1 suggest would happen if it is approved on Tuesday. There was no syphoning off of hundreds of millions of dollars from starving conventional public schools. No attacks on teachers. No surge in social or racial stratification of schools.

Instead, with the charter commission keeping local school boards honest, the number of children attending independent charter schools in Georgia grew slowly and steadily. Gradually, the number of pupils rose by the end of 2011 to just under 60,000 in about 100 independent charter schools—or less than 4 percent of all public school students in Georgia. (That number excludes so called “charter systems,” which actually remain under the direct management of local school boards and differ very little from conventional public schools.)

In Atlanta during those years, the total number of students in charter schools grew to just under 4,000—including 637 students currently enrolled in kindergarten through 8^th grade on the two campuses of Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, where both our children have attended.

THE NEW ATTACK ON EDUCATION REFORM:

All that began changing when the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in May 2011 that the state legislature didn’t have the legal right to have ever created the old charter school commission. (Read Doug’s op-ed on the ruling at the time here: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/opinion/charter-ruling-flunks-history-ignores-roots-of-seg/nQtnm/) Since then, growth in independent charter schools has stalled—at just above 60,000 students statewide. Local school boards no longer have to worry about being overruled if they reject a proposed charter or a renewal for no good reason. The number of proposals for new charter schools has plummeted—chilled by the newly hostile environment. At the same time, the state Department of Education, under the new direction of a state superintendent who has made clear his previously stated support for charter schools was less than it appeared, has become increasingly difficult for all charter schools to work with. Our funds have been cut much more dramatically than conventional schools.

Why does this matter even beyond charter schools?  It matters because charters have become one of the very few remaining places in the world of education where there are still people working to foster racially and socially diverse schools, and trying to convince families to stay in public schools rather than flee to private ones. That goal is at the core of Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School.  The driving force to improve Maynard Jackson High School, the conventional APS school in Grant Park, is an inspiring group of parents whose kids were reconnected to public education through our neighborhood charter school. Without charters, that would never have happened.

Meanwhile, in APS overall, the student population plummeted during the time since our group began working to create a charter school. There were about 57,000 students in APS at the beginning of Dr. Hall’s tenure—a tenure during which APS genuinely improved in some respects. Nonetheless, even as the population of Atlanta grew rapidly and charters were adding thousands of students to the APS rolls, the total number of students in the system dwindled to less than 49,000 by the time she retired in the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal.

Charter schools are by no means a solution for every ill in public education. Just like the best conventional public schools, they are human endeavors, and like humans they are imperfect. Sometimes they fail. They should never replace all of traditional public education. But in the decade that charters have existed in Georgia, they have vastly more often provided quality education for tens of thousands of students who otherwise wouldn’t have had good schools to attend or would never have participated in public education at all. Far more important, charter schools in many areas have challenged the fossilized local school boards and education bureaucrats who long controlled public education across Georgia to finally wake up and get serious about meaningful reform. And charter schools—embraced nationally by Republicans and Democrats from Bill Clinton to George Bush to Barack Obama–have revitalized the idea that public schools should serve everyone, and not just those with no other options.

If Amendment 1 fails, it will be open season on all charter schools in Georgia, open season on the small number of conventional public school administrators who have been supportive of them, and open season on the only truly hopeful trend in Atlanta public education for a generation.

Vote yes for Amendment 1.

Doug and Michelle Blackmon 

Nov. 1, 2012

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My heartfelt thanks to all of you who tuned it to watch the documentary in February. I’ve received hundreds of emails and tweets in the past 12 hours and thousands of visitors to this website.  It’s gratifying to see so many Americans with a serious interest in reconsidering and better comprehending these difficult aspects of our shared history.

Unfortunately, there are also still many people who are desperate to contort every fragment of history that they find into a foundation for a particular political agenda.  In the terrain covered by my book and film, this is done often by both Democrats (who want to forget their ardent opposition to civil rights for African Americans a century ago) and more recently by Republican supporters (who want to claim credit for passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, even though the moderate wing of the party that cooperated with Lyndon Johnson in those votes has since been essentially obliterated).

Earlier today, I rejected a comment from one person because of the sweepingly inaccurate depiction it contained of what was and wasn’t in the film.  He submitted another post a short while later that was marginally different, which I approved mostly so that others can see a good demonstration of what I call “historical contortionism.”  It’s an impulse to twist history in ways that make it propagandistic, and that can see history only through a lens of the present.  It values history only to the degree that bits and pieces can be used as ammunition in some contemporary fight–usually in ways that are irrelevant and ultimately false.

People who are serious about history, serious about the truth, whether they are conservative or liberal, Democrats or Republicans, realize that that sort of history–the kind of thing that used to come from the “Ministry of Information” in other countries–is dangerous.  Slavery by Another Name is about America’s failures. No one group gets the blame. No one group gets to take credit. Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise. Don’t become an unwitting, or witless, co-conspirator in a new effort to pollute our understanding of the past.

Here’s the response I gave to the historical contortionist, whose comment is on the blog as well.

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Over the past nearly four years, since the publication of “Slavery by Another Name,” this website has been the platform for an interaction with readers of the book that has been simply astonishing for me.  Even all the years spent researching the book, I have been amazed at the personal stories that have come to me through this blog and emails here–even as I was a woefuly absent blogger at the same time.

So I want to thank everyone who has visited this site, shared their stories and reached out to me in other ways. I have learned so much from all of you.  I’m also gratified that the vast vast majority of the communication I’ve had has come from readers who wanted constructive dialogue with others about the complicated issues of race and the past that are still so much at the center of America’s national discourse.  Even people who wanted to disagree with me have often had good and admirable intentions.  But there have been other voices too, who remind us that there are still many people in our society whose goals are destructive or propagandistic.  They are the strongest argument for continuing to seek honest conversation, driven by facts and clinical observation.

In a few days, on Feb. 13, 2012, the documentary film based on my book will appear on PBS, at 9 p.m. EST.  Hopefully, it will stir an even larger conversation about these important questions in American life–and hopefully it will once again be a discussion marked by constructive goals.  Wherever it goes, I’ll  do a better job of sharing my thoughts on the blog from here on.

Thanks again to all of you who have joined in this dialogue. Please stay with me, and encourage others to join us.

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