One of the women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault may have found a way around the statute of limitations — she’s suing him for denying he ever touched her.
One of the women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault may have found a way around the statute of limitations — she’s suing him for denying he ever touched her.
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By Ken Armstrong for The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. For more information — and a free daily news roundup — visit TheMarshallProject.org or follow them on Facebook and Twitter. Time is not always kind to the people whose names get attached to landmark legal cases. Ernesto Miranda, the defendant whose 1966 Supreme Court case forced police to inform suspects of their basic rights (“You have the right to remain silent…”) was stabbed to death in a skid-row bar. Clarence Gideon won a 1963 Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that established the right of poor defendants to court-appointed lawyers. When he died …
By Ken Armstrong for The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. For more information — and a free daily news roundup — visit TheMarshallProject.org or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
Time is not always kind to the people whose names get attached to landmark legal cases. Ernesto Miranda, the defendant whose 1966 Supreme Court case forced police to inform suspects of their basic rights (“You have the right to remain silent…”) was stabbed to death in a skid-row bar. Clarence Gideon won a 1963 Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that established the right of poor defendants to court-appointed lawyers. When he died a decade later the former mayor of his hometown recalled him as a “no-good punk.” It fell to the American Civil Liberties Union to put a marker on his grave.
Before the Gideon ruling, before Miranda , there was Mapp v. Ohio, the 1961 Supreme Court decision some legal scholars credit with launching a “due process revolution” in American law. The Mapp ruling changed policing in America by requiring state courts to throw out evidence if it had been seized illegally. The woman behind the ruling, Dollree “Dolly” Mapp, died six weeks ago in a small town in Georgia, with virtually no notice paid. She was 91, as best we can tell.
Mapp’s life was as colorful and momentous as her death was quiet. She went from being a single teenage mother in Mississippi to associating with renowned boxers and racketeers in Cleveland to making her way in New York City, where she launched one business after another. “Some of them were legitimate, and some of them were whatever they were,” said her niece, Carolyn Mapp, who looked after her aunt in her final years. Along the way she tangled with police, and when she stood up to them in Cleveland – a black woman, staring down a phalanx of white officers in the 1950s – she made history.
Wayne LaFave, professor of law emeritus at the University of Illinois and a leading scholar on search and seizure, called her the “Rosa Parks of the Fourth Amendment.” From talking to Mapp’s family and friends, it’s clear that she wasn’t always easy to get along with. “She could be difficult, OK?” said Deidra Smith, a friend of about 40 years who adds: “She was brilliant and beautiful and bold.” It was Mapp’s boldness – “strong willed,” is how she’s described, time and again – that most defined and served her as she confronted illegal police tactics and draconian laws. Mapp was at her most determined “if you told her no. That just meant yes to her,” said Carolyn Mapp, who lives in Georgia. “She didn’t let go of anything.”
In 1957, Dollree Mapp, an African American woman then in her 30s, rented half of a two-family house in Cleveland, where she lived with her daughter. Although she had no criminal record, she had ties to Cleveland’s underworld. Mapp was divorced from Jimmy Bivins, a great boxer of the era who defeated eight world champions but never got a title fight. Mapp had accused Bivins of beating her – “I had to leave him or kill him, and I wasn’t ready to kill him,” she would later tell one author. (Bivins had accused Mapp of trying to destroy his career by feeding him fatty foods.) After the split Mapp had been briefly engaged to boxer Archie Moore, the light heavyweight champion. But they never married, and she later sued for breach of promise.
In May of that year, police were investigating a bombing at the house of Don King – a numbers racketeer who later became a famed boxing promoter – when they received a tip that a suspect might be hiding in Mapp’s home. Three officers showed up at Mapp’s place, demanding to be let in. Mapp refused. She called a lawyer, who advised her to relent only if police produced a warrant. Even then, the lawyer told her, she should make sure to read it. About three hours later, the police, now between 10 and 15 in number, pried a door to force their way in. A lieutenant, waving a piece of paper, said they had a warrant. Mapp asked to see it. The lieutenant told her no. So Mapp grabbed the paper from him and stuffed it down the front of her blouse. She would later testify to what happened next:
“What are we going to do now?” one of the officers asked.
“I’m going down after it,” a sergeant said.
“No, you are not,” Mapp told the sergeant.
But the sergeant “went down anyway,” grabbing the paper back and keeping Mapp from ever reading it. In years to come, she would say she suspected the paper was blank.
The police found the man they were looking for (although he was later cleared in the bombing). But the search didn’t end there. Led by the sergeant who had retrieved the dubious warrant – a man who would later say Mapp had “a swagger about her” – police searched every room, upstairs and down, rummaging through boxes and drawers. During this search they found a pencil sketch of a nude and four books considered obscene, with titles that included “Memoirs of a Hotel Man” and “Affairs of a Troubadour.” Mapp told police the materials belonged to a former roomer, for whom she had stored them. But she was charged under an Ohio law that made possession of obscene material a felony. At trial, Mapp testified that when an officer found the books, “I told him not to look at them, they might embarrass him.” The jury took 20 minutes to convict, after which Mapp was sentenced to up to seven years.
Out on bond, Mapp appealed – first to the Ohio Supreme Court, where she lost, then to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear her case. Oral argument can be a dry affair. But Mapp’s case was an exception. The justices drew laughs from the courtroom gallery while leaving no doubt how absurd they found Ohio’s obscenity statute. They took turns toying with the lawyer for the state, asking, if mere possession of obscene material constituted a crime, why the clerk of court had not been indicted, or the administrators at certain university libraries, or psychologists, or bibliophiles.
When Mapp’s attorney, Alexander L. Kearns, presented his case, he spoke with “all the bravado of a Clarence Darrow and the inflection of W.C. Fields,” according to one book. Here is an audio clip of Kearns describing a pivotal moment in the case.1
In their initial consideration of the case all nine justices agreed that the obscenity law violated the First Amendment. But when Associate Justice Tom C. Clark drafted the majority opinion, he shifted the focus of the case to the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. By the time Mapp’s case reached the Supreme Court, it had become clear that the police never had obtained a warrant to search Mapp’s home. Lewis Katz, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, would later write: “The illegal entry of Mapp’s house by the police was nothing extraordinary; it was an everyday fact of life for blacks and other racial minorities. Police throughout America were part of the machinery of keeping blacks ‘in their place,’ ignoring constitutional guarantees against unreasonable arrests and searches and those that barred use of ‘third-degree’ tactics when questioning suspects.”
Ohio, like many states at the time, allowed evidence to be used even if it had been seized illegally. That turned the prohibition against unreasonable searches into a right without a remedy, making it hardly any right at all. In Mapp’s case, five Supreme Court justices decided to change that. They threw out Mapp’s conviction and declared that the rule excluding illegally obtained evidence would now apply in all the states – a judicial thunderclap that served notice of a court that would be reining in police in the years to come.
After her conviction was vacated, Mapp moved to Queens, New York. In 1971 police searched her home – this time, with a valid warrant – and found $150,000 worth of heroin and some stolen property. She was convicted of possession of drugs and, under new tough-on-crime laws signed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, received a mandatory sentence of 20 years to life. Mapp would later claim that the police had set her up due to her notoriety.
Mapp served time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, where she became friends with Deidra Smith, who was also serving a lengthy drug sentence. “Dollree walked with an air of royalty,” Smith said. She refused to eat in the prison cafeteria, because it reminded her of animals feeding at a trough. Instead, food was brought to Mapp by another inmate. Smith and Mapp helped organize opposition to the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws, which were later rolled back, with many of the mandatory minimums eliminated, and Mapp, who did extensive research in the law library, helped other inmates with such issues as visitation rights. In 1980 Gov. Hugh Carey, no fan of the state’s unforgiving drug laws, commuted Mapp’s sentence, and she was paroled soon after.
After her release, Mapp worked for a non-profit that provided legal assistance to inmates. A talented seamstress and dressmaker, she also threw herself into a variety of businesses, from beauty supplies to furniture upholstery to real estate. She spoke at law schools about Mapp v. Ohio and was interviewed for several books. A 1987 book co-authored by Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News, said: “Dollree Mapp is still a handsome, verbal woman, who has all the charisma and body English of a knockout.” Priscilla Machado Zotti, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, called Mapp fond of “colorful tales, embellished with curse words and opinionated bravado.” Carolyn Long, a political science professor at Washington State University-Vancouver, interviewed Mapp when she was around 80. Mapp was steely and unapologetic, Long wrote in a book published in 2006; in a recent interview she added, “I’m not easily intimidated, but I was intimidated by her.”
The accounts of Mapp’s life are rife with conflicting information – on when she was born, where she was raised, and even the race of her parents. Mapp was, it is fair to say, an unreliable narrator: She told different writers different things. Tiffany Mapp, who was Dollree’s great niece and who became her legal guardian, said Dollree repeatedly shaved years off her age. All the inconsistent birth dates “gave me fits with Medicare,” her great-niece said. Mapp’s family said the correct story is this: Dollree was born on October 30, 1923; she was raised in Forest, Mississippi, one of seven children; her heritage was mostly a mix of African American and Native American; and Dollree left Mississippi for Cleveland after having a child as a teenager.
Mapp’s only child, Barbara, died in 2002. About the same time, Mapp began showing signs of dementia. She continued to drive a “big old [Ford] Expedition” into her late 80s, Carolyn Mapp said. Tiffany Mapp recalled, “My great aunt was very, very, very strong willed,” adding: “She didn’t prepare for death. I think Aunt Dolly thought she was going to live forever.” Dollree Mapp died October 31 in Conyers, Georgia. Her family plans to spread her ashes in the front yard of her home in Queens.
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Dollree Mapp, 1923-2014: ‘The Rosa Parks of the Fourth Amendment’
Biographer Scott Saul talks about spending 8 years studying Pryor and why he never got bored, why Pryor is still electrifying, and what he would have thought of Bill Cosby. Read an excerpt from his book below.
Biographer Scott Saul talks about spending 8 years studying Pryor and why he never got bored, why Pryor is still electrifying, and what he would have thought of Bill Cosby. Read an excerpt from his book below.
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How Richard Pryor Invented The Edgy Comic Style That Branded Him An Artist
Leave it to the Screen Actors Guild Awards to throw Oscar season its first real curveball. Among the big surprises from the SAG Awards nominations special — besides that co-announcer Ansel Elgort was introduced as “actor, DJ and music producer” — was Naomi Watts, who scored an Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role nomination for … “St. Vincent”? It’s true: Watts, who plays a pregnant Russian prostitute in the film (complete with a thick accent straight out of “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) bested not just her own superior performance in “Birdman,” but other great ones from Jessica Chastain in “A Most Violent Year,” Laura Dern in “Wild” (or “The Fault in Our Stars”), Rene…
Leave it to the Screen Actors Guild Awards to throw Oscar season its first real curveball. Among the big surprises from the SAG Awards nominations special — besides that co-announcer Ansel Elgort was introduced as “actor, DJ and music producer” — was Naomi Watts, who scored an Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role nomination for … “St. Vincent”? It’s true: Watts, who plays a pregnant Russian prostitute in the film (complete with a thick accent straight out of “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) bested not just her own superior performance in “Birdman,” but other great ones from Jessica Chastain in “A Most Violent Year,” Laura Dern in “Wild” (or “The Fault in Our Stars”), Rene Russo in “Nightcrawler” and a host of other worthy contenders.
Fortunately, Watts’ out-of-left-field nomination wasn’t the only surprise on Wednesday morning. There were others, and some were great! Ahead, three talking points to ponder following the SAG Awards nominations.
Jake Gyllenhaal is still a contender
Huzzah to the Screen Actors Guild for remembering that Jake Gyllenhaal is a complete force in “Nightcrawler,” delivering what might be his best performance yet. It was assumed that Gyllenhaal was on the fringes of the crowded Best Actor race before Wednesday morning, but not anymore. Put him slightly ahead of David Oyelowo (for “Selma”) and Timothy Spall (for “Mr. Turner”) as a serious threat to earn the fifth and final Oscar slot (this assuming the Academy Awards follow the SAG lead and also nominate Steve Carell, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Keaton and Eddie Redmayne).
Jennifer Aniston might be an Oscar nominee
Speaking of conventional wisdom, the Best Actress race has focused in on four names: Julianne Moore (for “Still Alice”), Reese Witherspoon (for “Wild”), Felicity Jones (for “The Theory of Everything”) and Rosamund Pike (for “Gone Girl”). The fifth slot remains wide open, with Amy Adams (for “Big Eyes”), Hilary Swank (for “The Homesman”) and Jennifer Aniston (for “Cake”) remaining viable options. It was Aniston who got a big boost on Wednesday, grabbing a SAG Award nomination for her work in the indie drama. She plays a woman dealing with chronic pain and some great personal losses in the film, and it’s easily her best acting performance since “The Good Girl” in 2002. It seems Aniston knows she has the goods to get a nomination: She has been promoting the work everywhere, basically willing herself to contender status. Comeback stories and physical transformations are enticing narratives for awards voters, and Aniston has both. In a year without a solid fifth option, why not her?
“Fury” got more nominations than “Selma”
“Fury” was cited for Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture. “Selma” got nothing. So, not a great morning Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King movie. But that might have more to do with SAG voters not having widely seen the film than anything else. Last year, “The Wolf of Wall Street” was snubbed by the SAG Awards in a similar fashion, but still scored five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor. That’s good news not just for “Selma” (which, like “The Wolf of Wall Street,” is a Paramount release), but also “Unbroken,” “A Most Violent Year” and “American Sniper,” three other year-end releases with Oscar hopes that scored a grand total of one SAG nomination (“Unbroken” for Stunt Ensemble).
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Jennifer Aniston, Naomi Watts & The Biggest Surprises From This Year’s SAG Nominations
Racial disparities in social and economic outcomes exist in all parts of the United States. Black Americans make about 62 cents for every dollar earned by white Americans. Black Americans are also twice as likely to be unemployed and considerably more likely to live in poverty.
Racial disparities in social and economic outcomes exist in all parts of the United States. Black Americans make about 62 cents for every dollar earned by white Americans. Black Americans are also twice as likely to be unemployed and considerably more likely to live in poverty.
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LONDON (AP) — When King James touched the future queen of England on the shoulder after a basketball game, royal watchers cried foul. LeBron James, whose nickname is “King James,” met Prince William and his wife Kate at an NBA game between Cleveland Cavaliers and Brooklyn Nets in New York on Monday. The three posed for a photograph and James put his right hand on the Duchess of Cambridge’s right shoulder. According to protocol in Britain, a commoner is not supposed to touch members of the royal family — even if it is an innocent gesture. Photos of the meeting appeared throughout the British media, with many outlets highlighting the breach and …
LONDON (AP) — When King James touched the future queen of England on the shoulder after a basketball game, royal watchers cried foul.
LeBron James, whose nickname is “King James,” met Prince William and his wife Kate at an NBA game between Cleveland Cavaliers and Brooklyn Nets in New York on Monday. The three posed for a photograph and James put his right hand on the Duchess of Cambridge’s right shoulder. According to protocol in Britain, a commoner is not supposed to touch members of the royal family — even if it is an innocent gesture.
Photos of the meeting appeared throughout the British media, with many outlets highlighting the breach and pointing out James’ sweaty post-game shirt.
“He may be known as ‘King James’ stateside but LeBron James raised more than a few eyebrows when he got up close with Kate, still dressed in a soggy sweater,” the Daily Mirror wrote.
Kate, who is five months pregnant with the couple’s second child, stood between James and her husband and smiled for the cameras, but the Independent newspaper said she appeared “somewhat awkward as photographers snapped away merrily.”
The official website of the British Monarchy says “there are no obligatory codes of behavior” for meeting a member of the royal family, “but many people wish to observe the traditional forms.”
“For men this is a neck bow (from the head only) whilst women do a small curtsy,” the website says.
In 2009, the British media criticized another American breach of the “no-touch” rule when Michelle Obama put her arm on Queen Elizabeth II’s back at Buckingham Palace.
William, who is the grandson of the queen and second in line to the throne after his father, Prince Charles, was on a three-day visit to the United States with Kate.
During the meeting with James, the American player presented the royals with two Cleveland jerseys. One was yellow and had the name “Cambridge” on the back with the No. 7 under it, and the other was red and much smaller with “George” printed over the No. 1 for their 1-year-old son, Prince George.
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LeBron James Breaks Royal Protocol By Putting Arm Around Kate Middleton
Prince William and wife Kate met LeBron James Monday night after the Cleveland Cavaliers played the Brooklyn Nets in New York, and the NBA star accidentally breached royal protocol … by putting his arm around Kate.
Prince William and wife Kate met LeBron James Monday night after the Cleveland Cavaliers played the Brooklyn Nets in New York, and the NBA star accidentally breached royal protocol … by putting his arm around Kate.
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Tens of millions of Americans are deeply disturbed by the racism that has recently gotten the focus that it should have had for the past many decades. The failure of juries to indict police who kill African American males was not new, but the awareness of this reality which has been just one of the many faces of racism that weigh down the lives of African Americans in this society was quite unusual and momentarily broke through the dominant discourse that “that problem has been solved decades ago after Martin Luther King jr. saved his people by ending segregation and winning the voting rights laws.” Of course, even now there are many…
Tens of millions of Americans are deeply disturbed by the racism that has recently gotten the focus that it should have had for the past many decades. The failure of juries to indict police who kill African American males was not new, but the awareness of this reality which has been just one of the many faces of racism that weigh down the lives of African Americans in this society was quite unusual and momentarily broke through the dominant discourse that “that problem has been solved decades ago after Martin Luther King jr. saved his people by ending segregation and winning the voting rights laws.”
Of course, even now there are many in the media who try to deny the ongoing significance of racism in our society. Yet the outpouring of anger that we’ve seen on college campuses and in the streets of the U.S. is a reason for hopefulness that when the media turns its attention away from this issue some of the consciousness about racism will remain alive beyond the peoples of color who can never forget it as long as it is shoved in their face by police, unemployment, hunger, poverty, harassment, and endless opportunities to experience the contempt that many whites feel toward them.
Is it any wonder that some young African Americans find it hard to believe that there is a strong connection between how hard they work and how well they will be treated in this society? Does anyone really think that if a Black cop had killed a middle class white youth or strangled and then let die a white man that the grand jury would not have indicted him? What we have been hearing more clearly than ever in the past few years is the tremendous fear that African Americans carry with them at all times — fear of white majority and their occupying force in communities of color that we call police and some of them call “pigs,” and fear of the way the system keeps on undermining them, manifesting contempt for them, and treating the as though their lives did not matter.
That’s why I am so glad that this Sunday, June 14, the Progressive National Baptist Convention has called for a morning of standing in solidarity with African Americans. I strongly urge you to find a Black church near you and show up in solidarity. The focus is not only on mourning but in publicly proclaiming: “Black Lives Matter.” That afternoon, we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives will be holding a strategy conference to assess what needs to change in the way the liberal and progressive forces have developed in the past few decades that has rendered them less influential and hence less able to defend the mini-steps that were taken in the past to overcome American racism. I’m hoping that our event will spur dozens of others.
This is a discussion which can’t stay at the level of pointing out how spineless and hence disappointing President Obama has been, how absent of a positive message the Democratic Party has been, how splintered and unable to cooperate have been the various organizations and movements of the liberal and progressive Left. We need to look deeper.
The issue of racism, after all, is really the issue of “othering” — taking some group and making them the demeaned other. What pain in people’s lives makes this othering so attractive?
We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives point to the corrosive impact of patriarchy and class society in dividing people and making it in the interests of the powerful to foster hatred among groups of the relatively powerless. This has taken much more sophisticated form in contemporary capitalist society where most people have been indoctrinated into the belief that they live in a “meritocracy” in which people end up economically, but also in terms of the quality of their lives, families and love relationships in exactly the place they deserve. Those who are most successful deserve that, and the rest of us deserve what ever happens to us. The result: massive self-blaming which feels terrible. No wonder that many are attracted to religious fundamentalist or ultra nationalist movements or institutions which promise them support and caring (and this promise is often really delivered). However, the nationalist holidays pass, the Sunday church experience passes, and then people are right back in the very same capitalist marketplace in which they are seen as valuable only to the extent that they can accumulate lots of money and power. The selfishness, materialism and looking out for number one that so undermines loving relationships returns to the forefront, and the religious or nationalist high doesn’t last. And here the ultra-Right comes forward to provide an explanation: “there is some group that is destroying what would otherwise be a wonderful and nurturing society” and then point to whoever is the designated demeaned other, and blame it on them.
Jews were the identified demeaned other of Europe and it led eventually to genocide against the Jewish people (including many of my relatives). But in the US by the time my grandparents arrived here there already was a “demeaned other” that replaced Native Americans (once they had been genocided nearly out of existence), and so the demeaned other became the Blacks brought here as slaves and then eventually freed from legal slavery but subjected to various forms of domination and humiliation that continues to this moment. And the hatred of Blacks is layered over not only to function as an effective way to channel the anger that people might otherwise be feeling toward the larger economic system unto the backs of African Americans, but also as a way of protecting the American public from ever really having to face up to how debilitating and cruel has been the practice and legacy of slavery, then Jim Crow and segregation, then the more hidden but nevertheless pervasive ways that racism continues to function as a central dynamic in American politics and economics. We can witness how difficult it is for the American public to acknowledge the torture we visited on a wide variety of people in Guantanamo and other secret site, even when a U.S. Senate committee report provides much of the evidence, and that was only a few thousand people being tortured by a handful of distorted people. Imagine then how hard it is for a society like ours to have a serious look at the way tens of millions of African Americans and other peoples of color have been living and suffering. Far easier to deflect attention by blaming the victim — particularly in capitalist societies where people have already been taught to blame themselves for their economic failures, and where othering is the coin of the realm.
A serious anti-racist movement must address these psychological dynamics. It must affirm the possibility of a world based on love and generosity even in the face of being dismissed as “unrealistic” because even all of us have to some extent been immersed in the selfishness-generating worldviews that are taught in the schools and media and massively reinforced by our experiences in the capitalist marketplace, so most of us have come to believe that these behaviors reflect “human nature” rather than the products of a particular form of economic and social organization through which we’ve been living and then recreating in our own personal and economic lives.
Yet most people yearn for something quite different, and that is why we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the Love and Justice movement. More of that in my next column! For the moment, I hope you might yet try to get to the Reclaim America conference this Sunday or at least join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and help convene such a gathering in your part of the world. I
And given the now-documented torture that the U.S. Senate revealed yesterday is being highlighted in the media today, we have a lot more from which to be reclaiming America. But in the long run, that torture is just another manifestation of the “othering” that permeates the consciousness of so many Americans. How else explain the collaboration with the torturers by the American Psychological Association? And that othering is most systematically manifested in the racism toward peoples of color and in particular toward African Americans. So do find an African American church this Sunday and show up and demonstrate that they are not alone and that Black Lives Matter to you no matter what your racial, religious or ethnic identity!
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine and chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. He is the author of the national best seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back America From the Religious Right and of the national best seller Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. He welcomes responses from people who wish to build a Love and Justice movement in the U.S. with people who will take the psychological and spiritual dimension of human needs seriously–contact him at RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com
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Black Lives Matter — Go to an African American Church in Solidarity This Sunday Morning
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South African retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu has canceled travel plans for the rest of the year so he can undergo new treatment for prostate cancer, a foundation said. The Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation said in a statement Tuesday that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate is starting a new course of medication to manage “the prostate cancer he’s been living with for the past 15 years.” Tutu’s daughter and the foundation’s director, Mpho Tutu, said her 83-year-old father had planned to attend a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Rome this week. The meeting was…
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South African retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu has canceled travel plans for the rest of the year so he can undergo new treatment for prostate cancer, a foundation said.
The Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation said in a statement Tuesday that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate is starting a new course of medication to manage “the prostate cancer he’s been living with for the past 15 years.” Tutu’s daughter and the foundation’s director, Mpho Tutu, said her 83-year-old father had planned to attend a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Rome this week.
The meeting was shifted to Rome after the Nobel laureates suspended plans to hold their annual meeting in South Africa because they said the government there refused to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader. The South African government had said the Dalai Lama canceled his planned visit while South Africa’s diplomats in New Delhi were processing his visa application.
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South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu Receives Prostate Cancer Treatment
Just after I graduated from law school, in 2008, my second book was published — Black Greek-letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century: Our Fight Has Just Begun (University Press of Kentucky). In the foreword, I made two points about the choice of the title, one internal to Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs), the other external. First, there are a host of internal issues that they must address. Second, and similarly, their efforts to uplift African Americans must be robust and meaningful. Together, these two dynamics — internal and external — are fights that were not resolved in the 20th Century; they are fights that BGLOs must take-on in this day and in …
Just after I graduated from law school, in 2008, my second book was published — Black Greek-letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century: Our Fight Has Just Begun (University Press of Kentucky). In the foreword, I made two points about the choice of the title, one internal to Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs), the other external. First, there are a host of internal issues that they must address. Second, and similarly, their efforts to uplift African Americans must be robust and meaningful. Together, these two dynamics — internal and external — are fights that were not resolved in the 20th Century; they are fights that BGLOs must take-on in this day and in this age in order for to remain relevant, impactful, and even viable.
We are now in the shadow of the United States Supreme Court opinions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Fisher v. Texas (2013). We had to grapple with the court opinions in the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis. Now, we wrangle with the grand jury decisions resulting from the killing of two black men — Mike Brown and Eric Garner — by police officers. Figuratively, and in some ways literally, the country is on fire. People have taken to the streets to protest, rally, and resist. And the feelings and cries for justice have reverberated around the globe.
On Facebook, journalist Roland Martin asked his followers where were BGLOs in this modern Civil Rights struggle? Brother Martin is a proud member of the same fraternity as W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others — Alpha Phi Alpha — as am I. His question was a reasonable one. Black Greek-Letter Organizations are at a crossroads for a host of reasons. But to Brother Martin’s point, will BGLOs be meaningfully engaged in this modern struggle for racial equality? Will they be timid and do enough just to say that they did something? Will they sit on the sidelines?
I am Alpha Phi Alpha’s national Chair of its Commission on Racial Justice. My words here however, reflect my insider’s experience and an outsider’s (as simply a law professor who researches BGLOs) analysis. Alpha Phi Alpha’s General President, Mark S. Tillman has pushed on many fronts to get and keep Alpha Phi Alpha engaged in racial uplift. He has called on brothers and urged them to meaningfully work in their communities, including around racial justice. He, himself, went to Ferguson, Missouri to rally Alpha Phi Alpha brothers in the aftermath of the Mike Brown shooting. As quiet as it was attempted to be kept, though publicly leaked somehow, General President Tillman pushed for the fraternity to pay Mike Brown’s funeral expenses — not in an effort to show-up any other group, but rather to take the burden off the family of having to collect from multiple sources to cover the cost. Even more, he supported the allocation of a six-figure donation to four Civil Rights organizations from the fraternity and for broad and long-term partnerships between Alpha Phi Alpha and those organizations (for more details contact Alpha Phi Alpha’s Corporate Office). As the fraternity’s national Chair for racial justice, am I satisfied? No! I am never satisfied, as I believe in the ideals and mission of my fraternity, and I think we must constantly push to our limits of excellence, brotherhood, and service. But it is a good start and template.
Whether we look at the history of individual BGLO members, or their collective organizational work through the American Council of Human Rights from 1948-1963, or their funding of Civil Rights litigation, these organizations have a remarkable history of social activism. Indeed, each BGLO has a social activism component, but we live in a time in which they must be more robust, broad, and assertive. The old guard, the leadership within these groups, cannot afford to be out-of-step with the zeitgeist of the time. Young members want to take to the streets, to change the system, not gradually, but now! This is not a new problem. In a chapter within Our Fight Has Just Begun, social scientist and professor Matthew W. Hughey, penned the following words:
… the problem is … there is not enough attention on postinitiation instruction that encourages member consolidation and political awareness. “So¬lutions” to these problems have thus far mirrored the dynamics of colonialism, whereby a foreign power (alumni chapter or executive office) issues authoritar¬ian mandates to its subjects, only to be surprised when that repression breeds resistance. More attention must focus on developing interchapter partnerships and undergraduate-led solutions so that collegiate members are fully invested in and wholeheartedly committed to plans and goals. (2008, p. 409)
Black Greek-Letter Organizations will either lead their membership toward societal change, support their membership in this regard, or risk losing this young, strong, and dedicated generation to organizations more worthy of these youth’s ideals and efforts. It is a clarion call made by scholars Drs. Vernon Mitchell and Jessica Harris, several years ago.
We can no longer afford to be trapped by the trivialities of provincialism, organizational politics, and lack of vision. Our people need servant leaders, and, truthfully, they need more than our organizations have given and currently give. Black Greek-Letter Organizations must be more, do more, or risk being no more.
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African American Fraternities and Sororities: Our Fight Has Just Begun
