FACING UP TO AMERICA’S SHAME: ONE FAMILY’S ROOTS, A NATION’S HISTORY

One day America will have to come to terms with her sexualized gendered race hatred of Black American women and girls during slavery and segregation. Until then, the denial will continue to be a stumbling block in acknowledging that the various hues that Black people come in were the result of force, moreso than consent. Then again, why should so many Black people during those horrific times (and well into the present), want to acknowledge white blood, when those black people (considered black, due to the ODR), owed their existence to sexual coercion or a rapist?

And it is true, that there is some minimal amount of African blood to be found in American Whites (due to light-skinned Blacks passing and marrying Whites; more Whites in the general population than Blacks; “black” offspring thrown over into the Black community as some type of cast-off trash, and generally never acknowledged by the white father [especially when that black child was the first-born who stood to inherit property, personal effects, etc., from the White father.])

Acknowledging the white blood that flows in Blacks is not the only thing that must be contended with by Whites; they will also have to turn the mirror on themselves and acknowledge not only the black blood they themselves may carry. . . . .

. . . . .they will also have to acknowledge the brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, nieces, nephews, aunts, grandchildren……….that are related to them from their White male relative’s atrocities.

Two professors in the discussion said it best:

Professor Mary Frances Berry:

“Historically, race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved. Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of families even those thought to be white who have black ancestry.”

Professor Martha Hodes:

“Even the way we talk about these “connections” doesn’t nearly capture the trauma of such lives, and the idea of “racial intermingling” that “lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans” seems rather gently worded in the article. The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry linger in the family trees of white Americans, not just black Americans. In fact, these histories ought to make us pause over the very categories of “black” and “white.”

 

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October 8, 2009, 7:30 am

Updated: 11:57 am –>One Family’s Roots, a Nation’s History

By The Editors

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press Michelle Obama with her mother, Marian Robinson.

Updated, Oct. 9, 1:30 p.m. | Ishmael Reed, author and poet, joins the discussion.

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In an article published on Wednesday, The Times reported on Michelle Obama’s ancestry, tracing her maternal line back to her great-great-great-grandparents, a slave girl and a white man, and their son, Dolphus T. Shields, who was born in the 1850s.

While these findings tell of Michelle Obama’s roots, for many Americans her family’s story will also bring into focus a common narrative, which runs through the history of this nation. We asked some historians and writers, why has it taken so long for Americans to appreciate these deep multiethnic connections?

• Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of humanities, Harvard University
• Annette Gordon-Reed, historian and author, “The Hemingses of Monticello”
• John McWhorter, author, “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue”
• Martha Hodes, professor of history, New York University
• Mark D. Shriver, professor of anthropology and biology
• Mary Frances Berry, professor of social thought, University of Pennsylvania
• Ira Berlin, professor of history, University of Maryland
• Ishmael Reed, author

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Shared Ancestries Revealed

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and the executive producer and host of “African American Lives” and “Faces of America,” to be broadcast in February on PBS, which will explore the ancestry of Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, Eva Longoria, Yo Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Malcolm Gladwell, and six others.

As we have shown in the “African American Lives” series on PBS, fully 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry. Only 5 percent, in spite of widespread myths to the contrary, have as much Native American ancestry. And between 30 and 35 percent of all African American males can trace their paternal lineage (their y-DNA) to a white man who impregnated a black female most probably during slavery.

The illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape, guilt, shame, and disgrace kept these relationships hidden.

What this means is that, in defiance of the law and social convention, an enormous amount of “race-mixing” has long been occurring in the United States, about which we, as a society, have for just as long been in deep denial. I have never given an admixture DNA test of a black person who turned out to be 100 percent African, no matter how dark or “African” they appear to be.

Some of this inter-racial sexuality was voluntary, we now know, but far more was coerced, a reflection or a result of a profound imbalance of power. Because of a confluence of factors — the illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape as the source of these relationships, infidelity, guilt, shame, and disgrace — both black people and white people had a certain interest in keeping these relationships in the dark, as it were.

In my own family, Jane Gates–my great-great grandmother, born in 1818 as a slave — gave birth to several children who were fathered by one white man, including my great grandfather, Edward Gates. We know that he was an Irishman because of my father’s DNA. Because of shame, most probably, she took his identity with her to the grave. But using DNA tests, we have the chance of finding his identity, which we are pursuing in our next “African American Lives” program.

The first lady’s family tree — and the social and sexual complexity it reflects — is quite typical for a majority of African Americans. I am happy for her that her ancestors — long lost — have now been found by Megan Smolenyak. There is a certain inexpressible joy in knowing from whom you have descended, knowing where you come from. I have two missions: first, to help African Americans to uncover the roots and discover the branches on their family trees, and to help all Americans to learn to marvel at — and accept — the complexity of race relations in the nation’s history, a complexity registered in their DNA, a complexity writ large on the very face of Black America.

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Histories Distorted

Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is currently the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of Legal History at Harvard Law School.

The family stories of black Americans and the findings of population geneticists make clear that Michelle Obama’s family history is far from unique. The vast majority of black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in North America have some degree of mixed ancestry.

Appearances deceive. People get thrown off merely looking at the surface. Do you have dark skin? Only people who are fair-skinned are thought to have white ancestry. And anyone who “looks” white can’t have any African ancestry. Those presumptions go nicely with the country’s historic racial program: to fit everyone into their racial “place” to determine how they should be treated.

Certain presumptions go nicely with the country’s historic racial program: to fit everyone into their racial “place.”

That a person who looks like Mrs. Obama is not “all” black destabilizes things, especially when one considers the implications. Are people who look “all” white really that? I remember speaking with one white Virginian who insisted that the white Virginians’ fetish for genealogy stems from a desire “to prove who is white.”

That we’ve just started speaking openly about the complexity of black ancestry doesn’t surprise. After all, white Americans, through law and social customs, invested heavily in promoting the idea that people of African descent were fundamentally different (inferior) types of human beings than whites. Slavery enforced that notion, and that’s what segregation was all about.

What happens when you recognize that you and fellow whites share a bloodline with the people you are claiming are so different? And then there’s the fact that none of this has made much difference to black Americans. Having a white father or great-great-great grandfather didn’t mean much: they were defined as “negro” or “black” and kept their place in the racial hierarchy.

There’s also a lot of white Southern anxiety in denials of these tangled blood lines. Acknowledging them requires admitting what went on in the South; both the prevalence of the rape of black women and, in some instances, long-term connections between white men and black women in slavery and outside of it.

The evidence indicates that Southern white men of the 18th and 19th centuries were more used to sleeping with black women than white men today in all regions of the country; despite the popular notion that we’re living in a brand new age of interracial mixing. Some of those planters really were living like polygamous patriarchs of old with wives and concubines and bunches of kids. That’s the truth of early American history.

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Our Non-Post Racial Climate

John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English.”

If America now appreciates the mixing of races in our history, it isn’t clear to me just what the appreciation consists of.

Appreciating the mixing of races in our history does not eradicate racist feelings in the present.

One idea might be that if we appreciate, or acknowledge, the racial mixture in the past, then it will help eradicate racist feelings in the present. Surely, however, no one truly believes this could happen to any significant degree. The notion has a noble ring to it, but who supposes that a white person who harbors anti-black sentiment would change his mind upon being informed that slave masters often impregnated their female slaves? Or that genetically he probably has a bit of “black” in him from such interactions in the past?

Another thing that keeps us from appreciating such stories is that they are so often painful or embarrassing, involving coercion and illegitimacy. There is a story of this kind in my own family background, which my older relatives were reluctant to dwell on in conversation. To us now, it would seem like a complex tale of interaction between the races in the old South. To my grandfather, however, it was not a New Yorker think-piece story, but the beginning of a tough childhood he was happy to have escaped.

Of course there were less unsavory kinds of racial mixture in the past. I just finished reading Marcus LiBrizzi’s new book “Lost Atusville” about a small town in Maine founded in the 18th century, where black-white couples were hardly uncommon and occasioned little remark. But ironically, what keeps us from appreciating things like that as relevant to us is that we are as hung up on race in some ways as the people in Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother’s day were.

That is, we still have a kind of one-drop rule. Of late, the category “biracial” is gaining ever more of a foothold in the national conversation, but not so long ago (i.e. when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s) people with one white parent and one black one were considered “black” — and black people were as stringent about that as whites, often suspicious of mixed people who stressed that they truly were half-black.

A reader comment I get often these days is a white person asking why I refer to Michelle Obama’s husband as black rather than as half-black and half-white. The reason is because he presents himself as black. He talks about the white part of his heritage, of course, but if he had gone out campaigning explicitly talking himself up as “half-white” (a la Tiger Woods’ “Cablinasian” notion) a great many black Americans would have felt him as primly distancing himself from black culture, and would never have taken him to heart. The typical comment about blacks disavowing full membership is “Wait till he gets pulled over by the cops — then see how white he feels.”

In our decidedly non-post-racial climate, I doubt we’ll be seeing the fact that white and black people were making babies in the 19th century as something to appreciate — or even acknowledge.

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What Remains Buried

Martha Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, is the author of “The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century” and “White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South.”

Why have these multiethnic connections been so long buried? The answer can be found quite readily within the story of Michelle Obama’s genealogy. We learn, first, that one man listed a 6-year-old child among his legal possessions, right alongside livestock and farming tools. We learn next that the child was shipped, like freight, away from her loved ones, and then that another white man had sex with her when she was a teenager. Why should we wonder at the impulse to bury such pain?

The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry is found in the family trees of white Americans, as well as black Americans.

Nor did the descendants of slavemasters break the silence within their own families. Mary Chestnut of South Carolina famously wrote in her 1861 diary that “every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds.” As Helen Heath, the 88-year-old woman who attended church with Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, said so plainly: “people didn’t want to talk about that.”

Even the way we talk about these “connections” doesn’t nearly capture the trauma of such lives, and the idea of “racial intermingling” that “lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans” seems rather gently worded in the article. The often violent encounter of European and African ancestry linger in the family trees of white Americans, not just black Americans. In fact, these histories ought to make us pause over the very categories of “black” and “white.”

By the way, silence surrounds the history of sex between white women and black men, too. Such liaisons were often loving ones, and shameful for that very fact. When I uncovered the story of Eunice Connolly, a white woman from Massachusetts who married a black sea captain from the West Indies in 1869, I eventually found her great-grandniece, Jane Cushman. Jane treasured her family’s past, and shared many documents with me, but she didn’t know that her great-great aunt had married across the color line.

In fact, she didn’t know that Eunice existed at all — she and the sea captain had been erased from family history. Jane was thrilled to learn of Eunice, but that sentiment was new. For generations, people just didn’t want to talk about that either.

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In Some Ways, Race Really Is Skin Deep

Mark D. Shriver is associate professor of biology at Morehouse College and associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He and his wife Katrina Voss are working on a short online educational video series, “Reading Between the Genes: Genetics Evolution and Public Health.”

We face a number of difficulties in talking and even thinking clearly about population differences. We face a history that is marred by forced emigration, slavery and dehumanization. To make matters more complicated, some conceptual blocks result from an incomplete appreciation of what we have learned from the study of evolution.

85 percent to 95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations.

In the early 1970s new methods for assessing genetic variation on the molecular level demonstrated that 85 percent to 95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations. Contemporary society has taken this as scientific evidence that there is no “biological foundation for race.” How do we reconcile this cognitive dissonance? Is science telling us that our perceptions are wrong — that we can’t see “race”?

The resolution to this dilemma is not the mantra, “differences don’t exist.” Nor is the lesson, differences are not essential and easily distinguished. The genome is not singular and different genes have independent evolutionary histories. We humans evolved upright walking before evolving modern brain size.

This same principle holds for the evolution of traits and characteristics across populations with superficial traits changing rapidly. For instance, the light skin color of Europeans and East Asians evolved recently (less than 20,000 year ago) and only after the ancestors of these populations separated. Traits on the surface of an organism (for example, skin) are in direct contact with the environment, exposed to greater levels of natural selection. These traits are also exposed to the eyes of others; that is, to the force we call sexual selection. It is not at all surprising that visible differences exist from one population to the next nor should it be surprising that these differences might be mistaken as evidence for an essential divide.

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Grappling With the Meaning of Race

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania and former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

The wide dissemination of the story of Michelle Obama’s white, black and Native American roots informs the public of a rather common occurrence among African-Americans. Surely, however, white Americans must have noticed that few African-American descendants of slaves are anything other than of mixed race. This is true though the one-drop rule made us all black, however fair of complexion.

Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of white families who have black ancestry.

Many historians and descendants have written about the subject and I have discussed many such stories in my writings on race and the law. In my own family on my father’s side, one grandfather was descended from a white slave owner and an African-American slave and the other from a Creek and freedwoman.

Historically, race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved. Perhaps telling Michelle Obama’s story will lead to more admissions and discoveries of families even those thought to be white who have black ancestry.

So far, however, race-mixture stories have not led to grappling with the difficult subject of the meaning of race. It will be interesting to see the result this time.

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A Jumbled History

Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, is the author of the forthcoming ”The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations.”

Historian-geneologist Megan Smolenyak’s extraordinary detective work featured in The Times article is a great gift to the First Family and to all Americans. It reminds us of who we are and how we became who we are. We are a jumbled people, a product of violent and occasionally loving relations that we are only beginning to unravel.

There is much to be learned from Melvinia’s tale, and not just for the First Family.

The story of Melvinia and her descendants is a common one in the long history of American slavery. It speaks to the violence of slavery, an institution that necessarily rested upon — indeed, could not exist without — slave masters enjoying a monopoly of violence and being willing to use it in unconscionable ways. In this case, as in others, Melvinia’s fate reveals the presumption that white men believed it was their prerogative to have sexual access to black women.

However, it tells us nothing about the nature of the relationship that emerged from such unions — relations that begin in force sometimes turn in strange ways and can even conclude with respect and love. As Professor James Gillmer noted in the article, “these relationships can be complex.” Melvinia’s story also reminds us of how close slavery is, how few generational jumps it takes to get back to the era of slavery — a period, which encompasses the majority of American history.

Finally, it should be noted, that Melvinia’s tale points us as much to the history of white people as it does to that of black people. From various descriptions and from his picture, it is clear that Dolphus T. Shields, son of an enslaved black woman and a free white man, could have passed as white, and enjoyed the many benefits of white skin. He did not, but many others did. Their descendants often have no knowledge that they — as historian Edward Ball discovered — are as much descendants of Africa as they are of Europe, with a good portion of Native America thrown in.

For too long, the American people have divided themselves into imaginary categories that have no basis in any genetic reality. This reality has led some historians to conclude that a goodly portion — perhaps a majority — of Americans descended from slaves are presently “white.” There is much to be learned from Melvinia’s tale, and not just for the First Family.

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A New People

Ishmael Reed is the author of “Mixing It Up, Taking On the Media Bullies.”

The revelations about Michelle Obama’s white ancestors come as no surprise to most African-Americans who have white, usually Irish or Scots Irish, or Native-American ancestors, or both. Such a revelation debunks most books, opinion columns, and think tank papers about race that are based upon the myth of the uninterrupted African ancestry of those whom we mistakenly designate as “African-Americans.” Put them all in the trash can and let’s get real.

In his great novel “Black No More,” George Schuyler made a wager to his white readers that they could not trace their ancestry without uncovering black relatives. William Loren Katz and Noel Ignatiev have written about race mixing among Americans. Novelists Chester Himes and Joel Williamson have claimed that it has occurred so frequently that those whom we refer to as black or African Americans are indeed, as Williamson has written, “a new people.”

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THE VERDICT IS IN: ROYCE CLYDE ZEIGLER FOUND GUILTY; RECEIVES LIFE SENTENCE FOR MURDER OF ‘BABY GRACE’

Royce Clyde Zeigler, stepfather of little Riley Ann Sawyers, has been found guilty of capital murder.

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‘Baby Grace’ Stepfather Found Guilty of Capital Murder in Galveston

Credit: GALVESTON COUNTY DAILY NEWSby Kevin Reece / 11 News

Posted on November 6, 2009 at 1:28 PM

Updated today at 9:17 PM

GALVESTON, Texas—A Galveston County jury found Royce Clyde Zeigler II guilty of capital murder Friday for the brutal beating death of his 2-year-old stepdaughter.

The world first knew the victim, Riley Ann Sawyers, as “Baby Grace” when her remains washed ashore on an island near Galveston.

She was later identified as Riley Ann after her grandmother in Ohio, Sheryl Sawyers, saw a police sketch of the girl and called police.

The jury of nine men and three women, some of whom were wiping away tears during closing arguments, deliberated for just 4 ½ hours before reaching their verdict.

Zeigler will receive an automatic life sentence, because prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. Jurors also could have convicted Zeigler of a lesser charge of manslaughter.

Grandmother Sheryl Sawyers was present in the courtroom when the verdict was read.

“I love her. I miss her. And I’m glad that we, you know, we got justice for her today,” she said through tears outside the courthouse.

Prosecutors said Zeigler and his wife, Kimberly Trenor, who he met playing an online video game, killed Riley at their home in Spring in July 2007 during a discipline session intended to teach the child proper manners. Authorities said Zeigler was upset the 2-year-old didn’t consistently use “please” and “thank you.”

Prosecutors said Trenor and Zeigler beat Riley with belts, dunked her head in cold bathwater and threw her onto a tile floor, fracturing her skull. An autopsy determined Riley died of three skull fractures.

In two hours of emotional closing arguments, prosecutors implored the jury on Friday to convict Zeigler in Riley’s death. They called him a monster, while his defense attorneys called him guilty only of tampering with evidence in a murder perpetrated by his wife.

“He had the motive, the intent, and he had all the pressures of the world on him to the point he was walking way,” District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk told the jury of Zeigler’s admission that he would often try to leave their home if the stress of dealing with Riley got him too upset. “And he took care of business that day with Riley.”

Sistrunk removed his own belt and slapped a courtroom table several times to illustrate the hours of discipline investigators say ended with Riley’s death. The last two photographs he showed the jury included a smiling picture of the 2-year-old taken on her grandmother’s back porch in Ohio. He held that picture in one hand while displaying an autopsy photo of her fractured skull in the other.

“Riley went through hell that day over a period of hours. Riley was traumatized, not this defendant,” he said, pointing at Zeigler.

“You know what happened,” Sistrunk said to the jury. “You know how child abuse happens.”

“His self-serving lies and his pathetic attempt to get away with this murder, that’s why he came up with all these lies,” Sistrunk said. “The man can sit in front of his family and friends and lie to them because he knows he’s guilty of murder.”

But with a quivering voice at the beginning of his closing address to the jury, defense attorney Dee McWilliams said that prosecutors have a substantial case of Zeigler tampering with evidence in his admitted involvement in disposing of the little girl’s body. But, in his opinion, that is all prosecutors had.

“This man no more killed that child than the man in the moon,” he said. “But I know how all this looks. I know how horrible it is.”

The defense conceded from the beginning that Zeigler and his wife worked together in the elaborate attempt to dispose of the body. They kept her body in a blue storage container at their home for several weeks before dumping the body inside a blue container in Galveston Bay. Both offered numerous different lies to friends and coworkers about what had happened to the girl, including a concocted story about her alleged abduction by a CPS worker from Ohio. After the body was found October 29, 2007, on a small island in the West Bay, Trenor confessed, but Zeigler offered investigators several different versions of what happened. At first he said he knew nothing about the girl’s death. Then he admitted he helped dispose of the body, but insisted that Trenor killed the child.

McWilliams implored the jury to see that evidence and that web of lies as Zeigler’s attempt to cover up the crime and protect his wife.

“When the lynch mob is gathering pitchforks and torches in hand ready to march down to the jail, it’s not easy to say wait a minute and say what is the evidence this person has done that we’re gonna kill him for,” McWilliams said.

“The person who did this they tried and convicted of capital murder, and she’s sitting in prison right now,” McWilliams said of Trenor. She was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole last February.

“You’re looking at the face of a man who killed a child,” Sistrunk said in his closing argument. “And since that day in July, he’s been focused on doing just one thing: getting away with the murder of Riley Ann Sawyers.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report. SOURCE

INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR PREVENTING THE EXPLOITATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN WAR AND ARMED CONFLICT: NOVEMBER 6, 2009

Other titles on the environment and armed conflict from UNBISnet  UN | Non-UN		International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict6 November On 5 November 2001, the General Assembly declared 6 November of each year as the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (resolution 56/4). In taking this action, it considered that damage to the environment in times of armed conflict impairs ecosystems and natural resources long after the period of conflict, often extending beyond the limits of national territories and the present generation. The Assembly also recalled the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which emphasized the necessity of working to protect our common environment. Links to UN and UN System sites: United Nations UN Environment Programme Post-Conflict Assessment Unit Crisis in Lebanon – environmental impact Conflict and the Environment in West Asia (Iraq, Kuwait and the Region) GEO – Global Environment Outlook E-Mine Electronic Mine Information Network UN. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia Sustainable Management of the Environment UN. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs UN. Office of the Special Adviser on Africa Food and Agriculture Organization Committee on World Food Security Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Protecting Refugees – Working for People and the Environment Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Human Rights and the Environment UN-HABITAT Disaster Management Programme UN Development Programme Crisis Prevention and Recovery Additional Resources: The additional resources links on this page are provided for information purposes only and do not necessarily represent an endorsement by the United Nations. Armed Conflict and the Environment Project – World Wildlife Fund Biodiversity Support Program Armed Conflict, Refugees and the Environment Conflict (Wendy Vannaselt) In: World Resources 2002-2004 Effect of War on the Natural Environment (Jurgen Brauer) Explosive Remnants of War and International Humanitarian Law (ICRC) Green Cross International Inventory of Conflict and the Environment IUCN Statement on Armed Conflict and the Environment IUCN WAME Regional Office People and the Planet War and Kashmir’s Environment War and the Environment

 

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FOR WOMEN IN COMBAT, POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS TAKES DIFFERENT FORMS

I have written somes posts which have addressed the issues women in combat face, and how those issues differ for them in comparison to men in combat:

“Home From the Military: Women of Color”

“U.S. GI Women in Fear of the Enemy in Their Army”

“PFC Lavena Johnson”

“The War in Iraq”

Here is a New York Times article that speaks of how American women in combat are handling their wounds—–both physical and psychological, and how society-at-large views the brave women who serve in our armed forces.

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Women in Combat Share the Anguish

But for many, post-traumatic stress takes very different forms

A Combat  Role, and Anguish, Too

Chip Litherland for The New York Times

Vivienne Pacquette, who served in Iraq, is one of thousands of women who returned from war with a stress disorder. More Photos >

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: October 31, 2009

For Vivienne Pacquette, being a combat veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder means avoiding phone calls to her sons, dinner out with her husband and therapy sessions that make her talk about seeing the reds and whites of her friends’ insides after a mortar attack in 2004.

October 31, 2009

Courtesy of Heather Paxton

Heather Paxton with a group of women and children in northern Iraq in 2003. More Photos »

As with other women in her position, hiding seems to make sense. Post-traumatic stress disorder distorts personalities: some veterans who have it fight in their sleep; others feel paranoid around children. And as women return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.

Many spend months or years as virtual shut-ins, missing the camaraderie of Iraq or Afghanistan, while racked with guilt over who they have become.

“After all, I’m a soldier, I’m an NCO, I’m a problem solver,” said Mrs. Pacquette, 52, a retired noncommissioned officer who served two tours in Iraq and more than 20 years in the Army. “What’s it going to look like if I can’t get things straight in my head?”

Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.

Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat. With commanders needing resources in wars without front lines, women have found themselves fighting on dusty roads and darkened outposts in ways that were never imagined by their parents or publicly authorized by Congress. And they have distinguished themselves in the field.

Psychologically, it seems, they are emerging as equals. Officials with the Department of Defense said that initial studies of male and female veterans with similar time outside the relative security of bases in Iraq showed that mental health issues arose in roughly the same proportion for members of each sex, though research continues.

“Female soldiers are actually handling and dealing with the stress of combat as well as male soldiers are,” said Col. Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Research Program at the Department of Defense. “When I look at the data, I see nothing to counter that point.”

And yet, experts and veterans say, the circumstances of military life and the way women are received when they return home have created differences in how they cope. A man, for instance, may come home and drink to oblivion with his war buddies while a woman — often after having been the only woman in her unit — is more likely to suffer alone.

Some psychiatrists say that women do better in therapy because they are more comfortable talking through their emotions, but it typically takes years for them to seek help. In interviews, female veterans with post-traumatic stress said they did not always feel their problems were justified, or would be treated as valid by a military system that defines combat as an all-male activity.

“Some of the issues come up because they’re not given the combat title even though they may be out on patrol standing next to the men,” said Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division at the National Center for P.T.S.D., a wing of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

While more men over all suffer from the disorder because they are a majority of those deployed, Dr. Resick added, “people underestimate what these women have been through.”

Indeed, at home, after completing important jobs in war, women with the disorder often smack up against old-fashioned ignorance: male veterans and friends who do not recognize them as “real soldiers”; husbands who have little patience with their avoidance of intimacy; and a society that expects them to be feminine nurturers, not the nurtured.

War as Equalizer

When Mrs. Pacquette joined the army in the ’80s — inspired by her father, who served in World War II — men often told her she did not belong. “Women were seen as weak and whiny,” she said. “Men had to go on sick call all the time but when a woman went on sick call, it was a big deal.”

Even before she was deployed to Iraq in 2004, however, she sensed what thousands of women have since discovered: that war would be an equalizer. And it was.

In early October 2004, her convoy of about 30 vehicles set out from Kuwait for Mosul, one of Iraq’s most violent cities. On the way, she said, they were hit three times with roadside bombs. One exploded 200 feet from the unarmored Humvee in which Mrs. Pacquette spent day and night pointing her rifle out an open window.

Gunshots arrived, too, on a bridge in Baghdad. Soldiers took up positions outside their vehicles, and an Iraqi was killed. “It was my birthday,” Mrs. Pacquette said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’ ”

November 1, 2009

Ed Zurga for The New York Times

“Just admit that it happened. Then it’s over,” said Heather Paxton, Iraq veteran who received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, and whose disability claims were rejected three times. More Photos >

Women at Arms

The Psychological ScarsArticles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.

Previous Articles in the Series »

Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog »

Multimedia

Graphic

Trauma From War

Slide Show

Women in Their Own Words

Related

Health Guide: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

October 31, 2009

Courtesy of Aimee Sherrod

Carrie Bilchak-Ahmed, left, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and Aimee Sherrod, in Jordan in 2003. More Photos >

Instead, she surprised even herself by remaining calm.

“There were guys on the ground that I was responsible for as an NCO,” she said, adding, “As a leader, I had to keep my fear inside.”

But later on, the war’s consequences began to weigh more heavily. On Dec. 21, an Iraqi suicide bomber walked into a mess tent at a base across the street from her own and blew himself up amid the plastic lunch trays, killing more than 25 people.

Then a mortar attack hit the motor pool where her unit worked. At the scene, she saw three of her friends torn up beyond recognition.

Recalling the scene nearly five years later, Mrs. Pacquette’s dark brown eyes began darting back and forth, as if looking for another rocket. She was in St. Croix, the island where she grew up, but her body stiffened like a wound coil — releasing only after her twin sister brought their faces together, in a silent hug that lasted several minutes.

Her mind had returned to the moment. And this emotional flashback is just one in a long list of post-traumatic stress symptoms that female veterans now know intimately. Fits of rage, insomnia, nightmares, depression, survivor’s guilt, fear of crowds — women with the disorder, like men, can and do get it all.

Mrs. Pacquette’s twin, Jamilah Moorehead, said she noticed it soon after her sister’s first tour. “In the middle of the night, I heard this loud noise and there was Viv,” Mrs. Moorehead said. “She was crouching as if holding a weapon and she was not even awake.”

A military doctor gave Mrs. Pacquette a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in March 2005, but she refused treatment. “I didn’t want anyone to know,” she said.

That November, she returned to Iraq, where she said she managed to keep the disorder hidden because she often worked alone. She retired from the military in 2006, but is still struggling with how to face the diagnosis.

The worst part, she said, was seeing her personality harden. First, she lost the ability to trust the Iraqi soldiers she served with. Then at home, she said, she fell out of touch with loved ones, though her husband has stood by her side. Now simply standing in line with other people is enough to turn her into what she calls “a witch, but with B.”

Dr. Carri-Ann Gibson, Mrs. Pacquette’s therapist, who runs the Trauma Recovery Program at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla., said the hardest part for women is that they often feel ashamed and guilty because “they’re not supposed to punch a wall, they’re not supposed to get aggressive with their spouse.”

Dr. Gibson said that for men, rage, paranoia and aggression are more accepted, while women are typically expected to snap back into domestic routines without any trouble.

“Women apply that pressure to themselves as well,” she said. “They live with that inner feeling of anger, and that’s why we see more events happening at home than actually out in public.”

Dr. Resick of the National Center for P.T.S.D. said much was still unknown about how the minds of men and women handle war. But at this point, she said, men and women differ mainly in how they manage similar symptoms.

“You put a man and a woman in a truck and they get blasted by an I.E.D., we’re not seeing big differences there,” Dr. Resick said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “That said, there are different context factors that affect how people cope.”

“The women — because they are not surrounded by other women, they may be surrounded by men — may withdraw more,” she continued. “The question is, Who are they with when they come home?”

Homefront Isolation

Many women traumatized by combat stress described lives of quiet desperation, alone, in just a few rooms with drawn shades.

Nancy Schiliro, 29, who lost her right eye as a result of a mortar attack in 2005, said that for more than two years after returning home, she rarely left a darkened garage in Hartsdale, N.Y., that her grandmother called “the bat cave.”

Shalimar Bien, 30, described her life, four years after Iraq, as a nonstop effort to avoid confrontation.

And for those with husbands or young children, finding a social equilibrium is especially difficult. Veterans like Aimee Sherrod, 29, a mother of two, say they constantly struggle to balance their own urge to hide with demands from loved ones to interact.

November 1, 2009

Courtesy of Nancy Schiliro

Nancy Schiliro, 29, with the truck she drove in Iraq. More Photos >

Ms. Sherrod said that five years after her last deployment to Iraq, she still makes only a few trips a week outside her home in Jackson, Tenn., usually to drop off or pick up her 4-year-old son at school.

She often feels like a failure because her son pushes for what she cannot handle. “I don’t take him to Chuck E. Cheese because I’ll get angry,” she said, noting that the arcade’s bells and bangs make her jumpy. “Take him to a park? It’s a lose-lose. I don’t like open spaces.”

She can identify a handful of causes for what her mind has become. In Baghdad with an Air Force rescue squadron from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2004, she worked on helicopters, sometimes cleaning off the blood from casualties, and regularly receiving indirect fire. “I was getting mortared all the time,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “So someone was watching me.”

She also feels damaged from her time in Jordan, at the start of the Iraq war. One of only two women in her unit, she said, she was ostracized after asking to be shifted to nights because some of the men would not stop harassing her. Her superiors, she said, broke a promise to keep her complaint quiet and after that, the men in her unit lashed out. “This one guy said if I was on fire he wouldn’t even piss on me to put me out,” Mrs. Sherrod said.

Many female veterans report being treated with respect by male colleagues, more so as they proved themselves. But several women said in interviews that some men made their wartime experiences even harder.

Mrs. Pacquette said that on her second tour, in Baghdad, she took showers with an open knife on the soap dish after seeing a man flee the bathroom trailer, having just attacked a woman inside.

In Mrs. Sherrod’s case, the harm came more from being shunned by her unit. For months in Jordan, she said, she had no e-mail access. No phone. No friends. She was isolated.

So at home, she got used to pushing people away. On her first date with the man who became her husband, she told him she had post-traumatic stress, figuring he would not stick around. He did, but they have struggled to stay together.

She always wanted to be a mother, and described her first child as a product of a whirlwind return from war. She became pregnant with her son within a month of reaching home, she said, after a night of drinking. When she later got pregnant with her daughter, who is 9 months old, she said she still thought the doctors were wrong about her stress disorder.

Now, having finally accepted the diagnosis after connecting with other veterans online, she fears her own temper more than anything else.

The other day, in the car, she lost control when both of her children demanded attention. “I can handle one or the other,” she said, “but she was crying and he kept saying, ‘Mommy, mommy,’ so in the middle of the road, I stopped the car and yelled: ‘If you do not be quiet I’m going to turn around and hit you.’

“The look on his face broke my heart,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “He just wanted to talk to me. He wasn’t doing anything bad.”

She paused, then said: “I’m like that all the time.”

Homefront Ignorance

When Heather Paxton started working at the V.A. hospital in Columbia, Mo., two years ago, she discovered something she did not expect: no one saw her as a veteran.

Despite her service in Iraq, patients assumed she knew nothing of war. A male colleague who chattered about weapons dismissed her like a silly little sister when she chimed in.

“He’d give me the stink eye,” Ms. Paxton said. “He’d just walk away.”

For many female veterans today, war and their roles in it must be constantly explained. For those with post-traumatic stress, the constant demand for proof can be particularly maddening — confirming their belief that only the people who were “over there” can understand them here.

Men express similar sentiments; combat veterans of both sexes often complain about insensitive questions like, “Did you kill anyone?”

But women say they are also treated to another line of inquiry. Would male veterans, they ask, hear friends or relatives say, “How was the shopping?” Or “In that heat, how did you wear makeup?” Or “How could you have P.T.S.D. when you sat at a desk with a typewriter?”

Female veterans say they have heard them all.

They have also seen their sacrifice overlooked, in bars, where strangers slide past them to buy drinks for men who were never deployed; and at “welcome home” events where organizers asked for their husbands.

Tammy Duckworth, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot who lost her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, said such experiences show that “we’re going through a change — just like in World War II with African-Americans, the military is ahead of the American public.”

What many do not realize, said Ms. Duckworth, who ran for Congress and is now the assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs for the V.A., is that in war today, “it’s not a question, Can women can do a combat job. They just are.”

Some women have found ways to at least minimize the slight.

Ms. Paxton now has a picture above her desk, showing her, her mother and her brother, all in uniform.

Mrs. Pacquette has placed a decal on her cane (like many veterans, she has damaged knees and a bad back from lugging gear) that identifies her as an Iraq war veteran.

Sometimes, though, simple messages are not enough. Renee Peloquin, 25, a member of the Idaho National Guard, had to design a bumper sticker that says “Female Iraqi War Veteran” because the basic “Iraq War Veteran” message on her car led strangers to thank her long-haired boyfriend for serving, even though he has never spent a day in uniform.

“I’m so sick of being stereotyped,” Ms. Peloquin said. “Or being ignored, that’s a better word.”

The military and the Department of Veterans Affairs have worked hard to make the public more aware of women’s roles. There are now Army recruiting advertisements featuring women in war zones. The V.A. has bought hundreds of copies of the documentary “Lioness,” which profiles female veterans in Ramadi, while producing a video of its own with Jane Pauley that shows the history of military women.

Last year, the veterans’ agency also began a systemwide effort to make primary care for female veterans available at every V.A. medical facility nationwide. At Ms. Paxton’s V.A. in Columbia, and Dr. Gibson’s in Tampa, women’s centers take up separate wings of the hospitals, as the V.A. prepares for its population of patients who are women to double over the next few years.

For some women with post-traumatic stress, like Angela Peacock in St. Louis, the V.A. has been a godsend. She said that the doctors who helped her detoxify from drug and alcohol addiction saved her from suicide.

Many others, however, insist that the military, the V.A. and other established veterans organizations have not fully adapted to women’s new roles. The military, they say, still treats them like wives, not warriors.

Some therapists, case workers and female patients also say that because military regulations governing women’s roles have not caught up with reality, women must work harder to prove they saw combat and get the benefits they deserve.

V.A. officials, including Ms. Duckworth, say there is no systemic bias. V.A. statistics show that as of July 2009, 5,103 female Iraq or Afghanistan veterans had received disability benefits for the stress disorder, compared with 57,732 males.

But the V.A. did not provide the number of men and women who had applied, making a comparison of rejection rates impossible.

At best, women are caught in the same bureaucratic morass as men; the backlog for disability claims from all veterans climbed to 400,000 in July, up from 253,000 six years ago. At worst, women are sometimes held to a tougher standard.

Ms. Paxton is one of at least 3,000 female Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with stress disorder diagnoses and no disability benefit, as shown by the V.A. statistics.

Serving in Tikrit, Iraq, five years ago with a civil affairs unit, she took part in missions several times a week on roads regularly rigged with bombs. She worked closely with two Iraqi translators who were killed — she saw one in his bullet-ridden car just after he had been assassinated — and she came home with nightmares, depression and anger.

Though she received a diagnosis of stress disorder by a V.A. doctor, she had her first disability claim rejected in 2006. A second refusal came a year later, and the third arrived in 2008, despite a letter verifying what happened from a captain with her unit.

Her V.A. case worker, Julie Heese, said the rejections highlighted what made the benefits system so challenging. “The claims process is a tough one because you have to have really clear evidence,” Ms. Heese said. She added that it works best “with a well documented battle or attack,” not with experiences that may go unrecorded, like the death of a translator.

Newly proposed V.A. rules easing requirements for documenting traumatic events could help Ms. Paxton’s case. But she said she feared a fourth disappointment.

She said she no longer cared about getting money. After experiencing the grave shock of war and its never-ending aftermath, she would like a little more recognition.

“Just admit that it happened,” she said, her voice rising, over a meal her husband cooked at their home in Columbia. “Then it’s over.”

SOURCE

AFTER GRUESOME FIND, ANGER AT CLEVELAND POLICE

The police can give all kinds of excuses as to why it took them so long to act on these murders, but, that these women were Black women and that their lives were of little value cannot be discounted. The reign of the “Missing Pretty White Women Syndrome” still looms large in the minds of many law enforcement agencies across America, therefore, it is not surprising that there is never a concerted rush to employ every means at their disposal to track down the murderers and rapists where it concerns Black women.

That these women were known drug users, does not give cause for the police to devalue their lives.

“Shouldn’t the police have noticed that we had so many black women missing before this?”

That’s just it. The police have a history of not noticing the disappearance of many missing Black  women , and since they did not fit the profile of the MPWWS, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that the police were going to look high and low for them, as is evidenced by the strong odor of human death coming from Anthony Sowell’s house that was ignored so long by the police.

Poor….Black…and a woman.

The 3 Strike Rule has always been a bitter truth in the lives of so many Black women, and how the police handled this case shows it.

 

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Discovery of Bodies Has Neighbors Angry at Police

By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER MAAG

Published: November 5, 2009

CLEVELAND — After the third police station in a row refused to take a missing-person report about her niece two years ago, Sandy Drain took matters into own hands.

November 6, 2009

Ken Blaze for The New York Times

Sandy Drain, whose niece has been missing for two years, said the police in Cleveland initially refused to investigate the case.

Related

November 6, 2009

Mark Duncan/Associated Press

Anthony Sowell was ordered held on five counts of murder.

She organized search parties to comb abandoned houses. She got neighborhood children to help post fliers on light poles. She recruited a national advocacy group for missing persons to host a rally. She even hired a psychic to look for clues in her niece’s apartment.

“It was pretty obvious the police weren’t going to help us,” said Ms. Drain, 65, who added that the police began seriously investigating the case of her niece, Gloria Walker, only after Ms. Drain’s initial efforts prompted the news media to begin asking questions.

“If you’re from this neighborhood, you come to expect that,” Ms. Drain said.

Her desperation and anger have grown here on Cleveland’s gritty east side since the police last week arrested Anthony Sowell, a convicted sex offender who has been charged with multiple counts of murder after 11 decomposing bodies were discovered in his house and backyard.

Despite being accustomed to drugs and violence, residents said they were shocked by the case’s gruesomeness and appalled that a man convicted of attempted rape had apparently been able to hide such heinous crimes, even as the authorities were regularly checking up on him.

Community activists added that in recent years they had received dozens of reports from residents in this largely poor and black neighborhood who told of encountering similar frustrations in getting the police to investigate cases of missing adults.

“They belittled it and made jokes,” said Barbara Carmichael about her repeated and failed efforts to file a missing-person report about her daughter Tonia, whose body was the first of the 11 found in Mr. Sowell’s house to be identified this week. “They told me to wait a while because she would return once all the drugs were gone.”

Law enforcement officials insist, however, that they had done everything they could.

“We take these cases seriously,” said Lt. Thomas Stacho, a spokesman for the Cleveland Police Department, who added that Ms. Carmichael’s case had occurred out of Cleveland’s jurisdiction.

In the case of Ms. Drain’s niece, “certainly our records show that we spent a significant amount of time investigating the disappearance,” Lieutenant Stacho said, including checking leads, looking up license plates and obtaining Ms. Walker’s dental records.

Experts on crime also point out that unlike cases involving missing children, where the police typically react quickly, cases involving missing adults are more complicated. With adults, the police tend to investigate only when there is clear evidence of foul play, rather than just signs of a family feud or the disappearance of a drug addict who, perhaps, has chosen to remain out of touch while on a binge.

Many of the women from the neighborhood who were reported missing were known drug users, according to neighbors and the police.

But as a crowd gathered to stare at the cream-colored duplex where Mr. Sowell lived — one of the better-maintained homes in a neighborhood filled with abandoned houses — many people said it should not matter whether a person was a drug user for the police to investigate.

Many also wondered aloud whether they knew anyone among the dead.

“She has been missing since April,” Fawcett Bess, owner of the pizza shop across the street from Mr. Sowell’s house, said of a former girlfriend of Mr. Sowell. “But nobody really paid any attention because she was into the dope. It’s crazy.”

“I just feel sad,” Mr. Bess added. “All these girls missing, and nobody did anything.”

In 2005, Mr. Sowell moved back into this neighborhood of crumbling streets and vacant two-story walk-ups interspersed with a few tidy homes.

He had spent the previous 15 years in state prison for luring a 21-year-old woman into his home, then choking and raping her, according to the county prosecutor’s office. Mr. Sowell pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted rape. (Earlier reports on the county court’s Web site that he had been convicted of rape were incorrect.)

On the corner of Imperial Avenue and East 123rd Street, just feet from Mr. Sowell’s house, many people said Thursday that the only thing they remembered about the place was the stench.

“People thought the stink was me,” said Ray Cash, the owner of Ray’s Sausage, a meat-processing plant next to Mr. Sowell’s house.

To eliminate the smell, Mr. Cash said he had the plant’s gutters cleaned, drain pipes flushed and sewage drain cleaned with bleach. It made no difference.

The smell was so bad, Mr. Cash said, that his workers preferred the pungent air inside the meat factory to the foul odor outside, so much so that they kept the windows shut, even in the summer heat.

Last Thursday, the police finally discovered the cause of the smell. While serving a search warrant on Mr. Sowell’s house in response to an accusation of rape, the police found two bodies. By Wednesday, the count had risen to 11.

November 6, 2009

Ken Blaze for The New York Times

Neighbors of the house where 11 bodies have been discovered say the smell alone should have attracted the attention of the police.

Related

Neighbor Says Police Knew About Rapist’s House (November 3, 2009)

11th Cleveland Victim Confirmed and First Is Identified (November 5, 2009)

Councilman Zack Reed, who represents the neighborhood, said the smell should have been the first clue to the authorities that something was awry.

“Clearly, something could have been done differently,” Mr. Reed said, adding that he did not understand why the police and sheriff’s officers who had visited Mr. Sowell’s home weeks ago did not investigate the smell further.

On Sept. 22, two county sheriff’s deputies appeared at Mr. Sowell’s door to make sure he was obeying the reporting requirements imposed on sex offenders.

Hours later, according to a police report, Mr. Sowell tried to drag a woman into his house to rape her.

Experts say that while local law enforcement is required to track sex offenders when they are released from prison, the authorities are usually given limited legal leeway or extra resources to do this.

“The system that we have to do monitoring and supervision follow-up once they return to the community is just overwhelmed,” said Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Mary Mason rejected the notion that the police had done all they could to find her sister, Michelle Mason, after she disappeared on Oct. 8, 2008. Mr. Sowell was not caught sooner, she said, because the police ignored complaints from residents about missing persons, much as they ignored the stench from Mr. Sowell’s house.

“The police are still in the mindset that some people don’t matter,” said Ms. Mason, adding that while her sister had a police record involving drug use, she had stopped using drugs 10 years ago. “Shouldn’t the police have noticed that we had so many black women missing before this?”

Police logs show that officers worked virtually every day for months trying to find Michelle Mason, Lieutenant Stacho said. Similar steps were taken in other missing-persons cases, he said.

The reason it took 36 days from the time the police received a rape complaint against Mr. Sowell to the day they finally obtained a search warrant, Lieutenant Stacho added, was that the victim avoided repeated efforts by the police to interview her.

But Ms. Drain, who still does not know what happened to her niece, said she was tired of waiting for answers. “I’m looking at 10 bodies and a skull, and I’m hoping one of them is Gloria,” Ms. Drain said, “because it would be closure for my family.”

SOURCE

HATEWATCH: EBAY REFUSES BENEFIT AUCTION FOR ROEDER

EBAY refuses benefit auction for Roeder

 

By JUDY L. THOMAS

The Kansas City Star – October 27, 2009 / 11:19 PM

Related:

• Previous coverage | Online auction to raise funds in Scott Roeder case
• Mike Hendricks | Killing Tiller was far from a noble act

An eBay auction planned by abortion opponents to raise money for the man accused of killing Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller will not be permitted, company officials said Tuesday.

 

“Based on the details we know about the anticipated listings, we believe these would violate our policy regarding offensive material,” the company said in a statement to The Kansas City Star. “EBay will not permit the items in question to be posted to the eBay site, and they will be removed if they are posted.”

 

The announcement came the same day that Tiller’s family implored eBay to prevent the auction.

 

“These materials contain hate messages, glorify violence against abortion doctors who provide constitutionally protected medical services, and instruct on means of violence, including bombing, of abortion clinics,” said Lee Thompson, an attorney for the Tiller family, in a letter sent to eBay on Tuesday and approved by Tiller’s widow, Jeanne Tiller.

 

“We urge you to deny access to the resources of eBay for this reprehensible and vile ‘auction.’ ”

 

The auction was intended to raise money for the defense of Scott Roeder, who is charged with first-degree murder in Tiller’s death and is scheduled to go on trial in January.

 

Currently, Roeder is being represented by public defenders.

 

Roeder’s supporters are encouraging him to use a “necessity defense,” saying that Tiller’s killing on May 31 was an act of justifiable homicide. Other anti-abortion activists charged with violent crimes have tried to use such a defense, but with little success.

 

Those working on the fundraiser said banning the auction was a violation of their rights.

 

“They’re not only chilling the First Amendment of the Constitution, they’re raping the whole Constitution,” said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City abortion opponent and friend of Roeder.

 

She said the move wouldn’t stop those who are trying to help Roeder.

 

“We have other plans that I’m not at the discretion to say right now,” she said. “This is money for Scott Roeder so he can have a true defense. They’re trying to shoot down the truth of what went on behind Tiller’s closed doors and fenced gates, but it’s not going to work.”

The controversy arose after an article in Sunday’s Star about the auction. Items being donated included an Army of God manual, a prison cookbook compiled by a woman doing time for abortion clinic bombings and arsons, and several autographed drawings submitted by Roeder.

 

One drawing was of David and Goliath that depicted David holding the head of Goliath and the name “Tiller” on Goliath’s forehead. The words “child-murdering industry” were written on the corpse.

 

Dave Leach, an Iowa abortion opponent who was organizing the auction, planned to launch it Sunday. He was donating a reprint of an Army of God manual, an underground publication that describes dozens of ways to shut down abortion clinics, including bombing. Leach, who published the manual in 1996 in his magazine, Prayer and Action News, said he would cover the pages containing bomb recipes.

 

The prison recipes were being donated by Shelley Shannon, the Oregon woman who shot and wounded Tiller in 1993 and later was convicted in a series of abortion clinic arsons and bombings.

 

Dinwiddie, who made headlines in 1995 when a federal judge ordered her to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of abortion clinics, planned to donate an autographed bullhorn similar to those she used when protesting.

 

Roeder’s ex-wife, Lindsey Roeder, said she was thrilled the auction was being rejected.

 

She said she contacted eBay on Monday to voice her concerns.

 

“I believe that this auction could incite more violence on abortion clinics and doctors,” she wrote in an e-mail to eBay. “I do not believe that canceling this auction will in any way hinder Scott’s right to an adequate defense, as he has a good team of public defenders.”

 

In his letter to eBay, Thompson said that any proceeds of the auction should go to the Kansas Crime Victims Compensation Board. Such proceeds, he said, would come under the provision of the Son of Sam law in Kansas, which was designed to keep those charged with crimes from profiting from their actions.

 

It its statement, eBay said, “we do not allow items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity and will not be a platform for those who promote violence toward others.”

 

Leach said eBay’s policy was ambiguous.

 

“They won’t allow anything that glorifies violence, they say. Wasn’t World War II a bit violent?” he said. “Doesn’t eBay do a brisk business in books and artifacts that glorify the U.S. role in it? Isn’t the Bible sold on eBay? I can’t even imagine how eBay could rewrite its policy in a way that targets us without targeting a huge slice of its customers.”

 

 

SOURCE  

 

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It never ceases to amaze me that in addition to murdering physicians who do abortions, many people like Roeder would not give a starving child in their midst the time of day.

 

It is so easy to be moral relativists   when it comes to living children who suffer in poverty, child abuse, and neglect, but, on the other hand, they can be moral absolutists   when it comes to abortion.

 

Sheesh.

 

Good job, eBay.

 

No platform should ever be given to murderers, no matter what ilk they come in.

IN REMEMBRANCE: 11-1-2009

THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE: (1979 – 2009)

 

Lest we forget.

GREENSBORO MASSACRE:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre

  

  

Seeking Closure on ‘Greensboro Massacre‘ (washingtonpost.com…3, 1979, “Greensboro Massacre” that took place in broad daylight and was taped by local television news crews. No one was convicted in two criminal trials …http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10392-2005Mar5.htm… – Similar pages

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10392-2005Mar5.html Democracy Now! | Remembering the 1979 Greensboro Massacre: 2…

Nov 18, 2004 … This month marks the 25th Anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre, when forty Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an anti-Klan …http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/18/remembering_the_… – 45k – Similar pageshttp://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/18/remembering_the_1979_greensboro_massacre_25

Democracy Now! | Survivors of 1979 Greensboro Mass…Jul 19, 2005 … We look back at the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when forty Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an anti-Klan demonstration in …http://www.democracynow.org/2005/7/19/survivors

 

  

YOUTUBE GREENSBORO MASSACRE 1979:

 

“DEATH TO THE KLAN!” KKK + POLICE VS. BLACKS:

 

The Greensboro Massacre
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/arch…

  25 Years After

Greensboro Massacre: We Will Not Forget!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 835, 29 October 2004.

On 3 November 1979, in broad daylight, nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, where an anti-Klan rally was gathering. With cool deliberation, the killers took out their weapons, aimed, fired and drove off. Five union officials and organizers and civil rights activists—supporters of the Communist Workers Party—lay dying in pools of blood. Ten others were wounded or maimed for life. The Greensboro Massacre was the bloodiest fascist attack in the U.S. in decades.

Greensboro was a conspiracy of the fascists and their capitalist state patrons. From the outset, the fascists were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassinations, to the “former” FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. When the two-minute fusillade ended, the cops moved in to arrest the survivors for “rioting.”

Signe Waller, widow of Greensboro martyr Jim Waller, recounted, “The FBI had men going around the textile mills and showing people pictures, asking for their identification. Many of the pictures were of people who were later killed in the Greensboro Massacre, and one of them was Jim’s” (The Carolinian Online, 18 October). Two successive all-white juries acquitted the killers of all charges, affirming once again the meaning of “justice” in this racist capitalist country.

Carried out during the Democratic Carter administration, the Greensboro Massacre was the opening shot of what would be the Reagan years’ war on labor and blacks. When the Klan announced it would “celebrate” this massacre on November 10 in Detroit, the Spartacist League initiated a labor/black mobilization that drew over 500, many of them black auto workers, who made sure that the Klan did not ride in the Motor City. In organizing the protest we had to […]

 THE GREENSBORO TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION

 

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JOHN O’QUINN, STAR PERSONAL-INJURY LAWYER IN TEXAS

 

By KATE MURPHY

Published: October 31, 2009

 

John O’Quinn, a plaintiff’s lawyer whose outsized personality matched the jury awards he won for his clients, died Thursday when the sport utility vehicle he was driving jumped a median, crossed several lanes of oncoming traffic and smashed into a tree along a parkway in Houston. Mr. O’Quinn was 68 and lived in Houston.

 

 

October 31, 2009

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

John O’Quinn

A spokesman for the Houston Police Department said Mr. O’Quinn was found dead when emergency crews extricated him from the mangled vehicle. A passenger, Johnny Lee Cutliff, 56, Mr. O’Quinn’s personal assistant, was also killed. Neither man was wearing a seat belt, the police department said. An investigation into the cause of the crash is continuing.

 

A bare-knuckles litigator who forced makers of cigarettes and breast implants to forfeit billions of dollars in awards in personal-injury cases, Mr. O’Quinn portrayed himself as a crusader against corporate malfeasance. He told Texas Monthly in 1995: “When the bad guys come, who do you want? You don’t want some namby-pamby son of a bitch. If companies obeyed the law, I’d be the Maytag repairman.”

 

Raised by his auto mechanic father, Mr. O’Quinn was known for connecting with blue-collar juries. “Even though he got manicures, he remembered what it was like to have grease under your nails,” Jack Rains, a friend since the two were in law school together at the University of Houston in the 1960s, said in a phone interview.

 

Mr. O’Quinn first gained prominence in 1986 when he persuaded jurors to order the Monsanto Company to pay $100 million in damages for negligently exposing an employee to benzene. The award was later vacated, and the case was settled out of court. In another notable case, he persuaded a jury to award a client $8 million for the wrongful death of a bull due to pesticide poisoning.

 

In a series of decisions in the 1990s, Mr. O’Quinn, with his former law partner Richard Laminack, won more than a billion dollars from makers of silicone breast implants for women who said they had been harmed by them. He was one of five lawyers who shared a $3.3 billion fee for brokering a 1998 settlement between tobacco companies and the State of Texas, which sued to recover state costs for treating smoking-related illnesses. And in 2004, he won a $1 billion verdict against Wyeth, a manufacturer of a weight-loss product containing the drug combination known as fen-phen, now banned.

 

“No one worked harder than he did,” said Mr. Rains, who said he believed his friend’s drive was due to his difficult upbringing in a home without a mother and with a stern and exacting father. “Hungry dogs hunt better,” Mr. Rains said.

 

John Maurice O’Quinn was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Sept. 4, 1941, to Leonard O’Quinn and Jean Wilkes O’Quinn. The family moved to Houston when Mr. O’Quinn was a toddler, and his mother left him and his father when he was 4. He grew up working in his father’s auto repair shop near Rice University, where he enrolled as an engineering student upon graduating from high school. A lackluster student who was often on academic probation, Mr. O’Quinn dropped out of Rice after six semesters and enrolled in the newly established University of Houston Law School, which in the early 1960s was accepting students without a college degree.

 

“From Minute 1 of Day 1 of Class 1, I felt like a duck who’d gone to water,” he told The Houston Chronicle in 1998. “I knew this is where I should be.”

 

As a lawyer, Mr. O’Quinn was reprimanded repeatedly for his antics in and out of the courtroom. He was once cited for contempt for sleeping on the floor in a vacant courtroom, and he was accused of jury tampering when it was revealed that he was romantically involved with a juror in one case; it later emerged that the affair began after the trial.

 

Vilified by proponents of tort reform, Mr. O’Quinn was investigated on several occasions on charges of inappropriately soliciting clients. In 2007, he was ordered by an arbitration panel to pay more than $40 million for overcharging several women he represented in a class-action case involving breast implants. That decision is on appeal.

 

“It’s fair to say a lot of people had grudges against John, and he evoked strong responses,” Mr. Rains said.

 

Upset over Mr. O’Quinn’s malpractice suits related to breast implants, more than a hundred doctors in Houston signed a petition in 2005 to reject Mr. O’Quinn’s $25 million donation to St. Luke’s Hospital, which included a provision to rename an office tower after him.

 

Today his name is on that tower and on several other buildings in Houston, clearly advertising his largess to various institutions, including the University of Houston and the Menninger Clinic, where he was once admitted for treatment of alcohol abuse after an arrest on drunken-driving charges. His friends said he had not had a drink in almost a decade, not even to raise a toast at his lavish Christmas and birthday parties, at which entertainers like Don Henley and Jerry Lee Lewis have performed.

 

Although he said work was his hobby, Mr. O’Quinn has since 2003 pursued a passion for car collecting. His collection numbers 850, said his partner of 11 years, Darla Lexington. It includes the Batmobile used in the filming of “Batman Forever” and Pope John Paul II’s 1975 Ford Escort GL.

 

Mr. O’Quinn’s two marriages ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Lexington, he leaves no immediate family members.

 

SOURCE 

  

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MICHELLE TRIOLA MARVIN, OF LANDMARK PALIMONY SUIT

 

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Published: October 30, 2009

 

Michelle Triola Marvin, whose landmark alimony-without-marriage lawsuit against the actor Lee Marvin, her former boyfriend, helped lead to the concept of “palimony” settlements for unmarried partners, died on Friday morning in Malibu at the home she shared with Dick Van Dyke. She was 76.

 

 

United Press International

October 31, 2009

Michelle Triola Marvin being interviewed in 1979.

The cause was lung cancer, a spokesman, Bob Palmer, told The Associated Press.

Michelle Triola was a little-known actress and singer in 1964 when she began living with Mr. Marvin, the leading man whose role as a gunslinger in “Cat Ballou” earned him an Academy Award a year later. After the couple split in the early 70’s, Ms. Triola, who by that time had adopted Mr. Marvin’s last name, retained a lawyer and took Mr. Marvin to court, claiming that she deserved part of his $3.6 million fortune because their relationship had been based on an unwritten contract just as legitimate as a marriage certificate.

 

Her lawyer, Marvin M. Mitchelson, argued that Ms. Triola Marvin had an oral agreement with Mr. Marvin that she would give up her career and devote herself to him full time, “as a companion, homemaker, housekeeper and cook.” In return, Mr. Mitchelson argued, Mr. Marvin had agreed to provide all of Ms. Triola Marvin’s “financial support and needs for the rest of her life.”

 

In 1979, after a sensational three-month trial that featured Hollywood celebrities testifying in support of Mr. Marvin, a judge rejected Ms. Triola Marvin’s claim that the two shared any expressed or implicit contract. But in a small victory for her, the court ruled that she was entitled to $104,000 in “rehabilitative” alimony, or palimony, a portmanteau of “pal” and “alimony.”

 

The case broke ground, and the attention surrounding it prompted a flood of similar cases and brought Mr. Mitchelson a lucrative career as a divorce lawyer. The case established a precedent in California that allowed unmarried partners to sue for financial support, and courts in Connecticut, New Jersey and many other states soon followed suit.

 

Ms. Triola Marvin went on to work for a public relations firm, and began a relationship with Mr. Van Dyke, with whom she lived for 30 years. Besides Mr. Van Dyke, she is survived by a sister, Diane Triola Johnson of Los Angeles.

 

Mr. Marvin died in 1987.

 

Her small victory in Marvin v. Marvin was short lived. In 1981, a California appeals court, in a 2-to-1 ruling, overturned the judgment. Ms. Triola Marvin later said in an interview on “Good Morning America” that she had not been surprised by the decision because the appeals panel was made up of two men and one woman.

 

“I understand that the woman tried very hard to reach the two men in her argument,” she said.

 

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JOHN PEMBERTON JR., CIVIL RIGHTS CRUSADER

 

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: October 29, 2009

 

John de J. Pemberton Jr., who as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Unionduring the turbulent 1960s helped double its size and shift its focus to the criminal courts as an arena for issues like civil rights and Vietnam, died Oct. 21 in Monte Rio, Calif. He was 90.

 

 

October 30, 2009

American Civil Liberties Union

John de J. Pemberton Jr.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Nancy Pemberton.

Mr. Pemberton, who said he considered himself a militant on civil liberties issues, sometimes had to balance the views of other militants with those of A.C.L.U. members who favored a more moderate approach. A contentious issue early in the Vietnam War was whether the civil rights group should help draft resisters. It eventually did, in 1968.

“The in-fighting gives us our strength,” Mr. Pemberton said in an interview with The New York Times in 1970.

 

The A.C.L.U. certainly grew stronger under Mr. Pemberton’s leadership. When he became executive director in 1962, there were 28 A.C.L.U. affiliates with a membership of 61,000 people and a total income of $535,000. When he stepped down in 1970, there were 47 affiliates with a membership of 144,000 and a total income of $2 million.

 

Mr. Pemberton helped orchestrate a major shift in the A.C.L.U.’s legal strategy. The group had historically chosen to pursue appeals of important test cases in higher courts in order to establish a constitutional principle, often as a friend of the court.

 

But, under Mr. Pemberton and his board, the A.C.L.U. came to serve as criminal counsel for an individual defendant in 95 percent of the cases. He said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1966 that this change was necessary to make the lower courts work.

 

“We no longer think that, because the Supreme Court says thus and so, the cop on the beat will behave that way,” he said. “But if the cop knows that the citizen he meets in the street will be able to get a lawyer and go to court, then his behavior will change.”

 

Nowhere was the new focus on defending criminal cases more critical than in the South, where in 1964 the A.C.L.U. created a legal unit to ally with other civil rights organizations to provide legal counsel. One case involved 1,100 people arrested for parading without a permit in Jackson, Miss. Another involved defending a black man accused of raping a white woman.

 

Under Mr. Pemberton’s leadership, the A.C.L.U. pressed ahead on its historic overall mission of advocating for controversial defendants on civil liberties grounds. They included Communists, members of the Ku Klux Klan, Black Panthers, the Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Lt. William A. Calley Jr., who was convicted of ordering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

 

In 1969 Mr. Pemberton wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird saying that the publication of pictures showing the murdered Vietnamese made it impossible for Lieutenant Calley to get a fair trial.

 

John de Jarnette Pemberton Jr. was born on April 21, 1919, in Rochester, Minn., where his father was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. He graduated from Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, where he was on the editorial board of The Harvard Law Review.

He practiced law in Rochester from 1950 to 1962, and was chairman of the Minnesota branch of the A.C.L.U. from 1955 to 1958. In one of his cases for the union, he represented a white man and an Indian woman who were barred from completing the purchase of a joint cemetery lot because contract language limited the cemetery to Caucasians. He won the case.

 

After leaving the A.C.L.U., Mr. Pemberton was acting general counsel for the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and regional attorney for the commission in San Francisco, where he taught at the University of San Francisco. He previously taught at Duke and New York University.

 

Mr. Pemberton’s first marriage, to the former Lorraine Pruett, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Nancy, he is survived by his wife of 36 years, Frances Werner; his daughters Sally Zalek and Ann and Caro Pemberton; his son, James; four grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

 

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ELMER WINTER, CO-FOUNDER OF MANPOWER TEMPORARY AGENCY

 

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: October 30, 2009

 

Elmer Winter, whose very bad day at the office — he and his law partner madly scrambled to find emergency secretarial help — spurred them to start Manpower, the worldwide temp agency, died on Oct. 22 in Mequon, Wis. He was 97 and lived in Fox Point, Wis.

 

 

October 30, 2009

Courtsey of Manpower

Elmer Winter last month.

Manpower announced the death.

 

In April 1948, Mr. Winter and his brother-in-law and law partner, Aaron Scheinfeld, had to file a brief on a tight deadline with the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They could find no one to type it.

 

They finally hunted down their former secretary and persuaded her to toil until dawn. Their problem was solved, but they thought about the experience. They recalled a legal client who supplied short-term laborers for unloading freight cars. Maybe they could do the same thing for a broader range of employers.

 

So they scraped together $7,000, rented a small store in Milwaukee and went into the business of arranging for temporary employees. A friend suggested the obvious and almost perfect name Manpower; most of the original employees were women.

 

The first year did not go so well. They lost $9,000, despite long lines of typists, stenographers and bookkeepers eager for the temporary work they spoke of in a newspaper ad. But the two decided to stay with their new sideline because what few paying customers they had were happy. By the end of 1949, they had covered their losses and made a small profit.

 

Six decades later, Manpower has grown to be the world’s third-largest company in the business of providing temporary and other staffing services. It has 4,100 offices in 82 countries, and 400,000 clients, ranging from small businesses to huge corporations.

 

Manpower has twice been acquired by other companies and emerged as an independent company both times. Today it offers many employment services beyond temporary labor, including the placements of permanent employees. Workers accrue benefits based on how long they work, even if they work for many employers.

 

Mr. Scheinfeld, the dreamer, died in 1970, but Mr. Winter, the nuts-and-bolts guy, stayed until 1976, when he retired. Manpower then had offices in 20 countries.

 

But Mr. Winter kept an office in the building, and a title, chairman of the advisory council. He also kept busy: he formed an organization to promote business ties between the United States and Israel; served as president of the American Jewish Committee; led efforts to aid Milwaukee youth; and was beloved by generations of Manpower employees who relished his stories and lavender sports coats.

 

Moreover, he made something of a name for himself as a sculptor, specializing in turning automobile bumpers into works of art. A particularly soaring creation was titled “To Dream the Impossible Dream.”

 

Mr. Winter chuckled at the reaction of a man who viewed one of his deliberately mangled works in Philadelphia: “I don’t know anything about art, but this guy is a lousy welder,” he said.

 

Another of Mr. Winter’s accomplishments was writing 13 how-to books on subjects like how to be a better secretary.

 

His winning personality, sugar-coated with modesty, never hurt him.

 

“I was not an outstanding kind of guy that was bound to succeed,” Mr. Winter said in a documentary about Manpower’s history last year. “I was just a nice guy.”

 

Elmer Louis Winter was born in Milwaukee on March 6, 1912. His father, Sigmund, was an immigrant who owned a clothing store. Elmer’s first job in 1922 was delivering fruits and vegetables by horse-drawn cart to brewery workers. He went to Milwaukee public schools, and earned economics and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin.

 

In 1936, he was offered a job in the Chicago law firm owned by Mr. Scheinfeld for $30 a month, according to “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Encyclopedia of Entrepreneurs.” When the firm expanded to Milwaukee, Mr. Winter managed the new office. After Manpower’s success seemed certain, both men retired from practicing law.

 

Private employment agencies had existed in the United States since 1863, but the modern temporary staffing industry began after World War II with the founding of Kelly Girls by William Kelly in 1946. Later called Kelly Services, it was the first multiregional temporary agency. Manpower was the first to expand beyond clerical help into industrial positions, the journal, Regulation, reported in 1998.

 

For workers, the appeal of the temporary-help agencies is flexibility and variety. For companies, it is the ability to react quickly to changes in labor needs. Training programs Mr. Winter helped establish benefited both sides.

 

Secretaries were given free brush-up courses that included training on new office machines like electric typewriters, The New York Times reported in 1966. Instructors tried to instill confidence in women returning to the work force after an absence.

 

“They are made to believe they can cope with any modern business situation,” Mr. Winter said.

 

Mr. Winter’s wife of 54 years, the former Nannette Rosenberg, died in 1990. He is survived by his wife, the former Hope Melamed; his daughters, Sue Freeman, Lynn Winter Gross and Martha Gross Tracy; eight grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.

 

When Mr. Winter was 95, he bought a red sports car. When he was 96, he passed a driver’s test to renew his license until the age of 104. Three weeks before his death, he drove to Manpower’s headquarters to put in his usual day’s work.

 

“Hang in there, Elmer,” said the sign on his desk.

 

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ROY DECARAVA, HARLEM INSIDER WHO PHOTOGRAPHED ORDINARY LIFE

 

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: October 28, 2009

 

Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas, becoming one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling the lives of its ordinary people and its jazz giants, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

 

 

October 29, 2009

Sherry Turner DeCarava

Roy DeCarava in 1996.

His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his wife and an art historian who has written about his work.

 

Mr. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work he began to gravitate toward photography, partly because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.”

 

Over a career of almost 60 years, Mr. DeCarava — who fiercely guarded the manner in which his work was exhibited and whose visibility in the art world remained low for decades — came to be regarded as the founder of a school of African-American photography that broke with the social documentary traditions of his time. While an outspoken crusader for civil rights, he felt that his pictures would speak louder as a record of black life in America if they abandoned the overtly humanist aims of mentors like Edward Steichen.

 

“I do not want a documentary or sociological statement,” he wrote in his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he won in 1952, becoming the first black photographer to do so. His goal, he explained, was “a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.”

 

His books, like “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” a best-selling 1955 collaboration with Langston Hughes, and his most famous photographs — a girl in a pristine graduation dress heading down a desolate, shadowed street; a man ascending wearily from the subway; a stage portrait of John Coltrane playing with closed-eyed fury — were hugely influential, paving the way for younger photographers like Beuford Smith and Carrie Mae Weems.

 

“One of the things that got to me,” Mr. DeCarava told The New York Times in 1982, “was that I felt that black people were not being portrayed in a serious and in an artistic way.”

 

Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who organized a retrospective of Mr. DeCarava’s work there in 1996, said of him on Wednesday: “He was looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle. No photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively.”

 

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was born in New York on Dec. 9, 1919. He was the only child of Elfreda Ferguson, a Jamaican immigrant, who separated from Mr. DeCarava’s father not long after his birth. As a child he shined shoes and delivered newspapers and ice to make ends meet, while his mother, an amateur photographer, made sure that his artistic talents were nurtured with music lessons and drawing supplies.

 

He was one of only two black students at a high school for textile studies in the Chelsea section and one of only a few at the Cooper Union School of Art, to which he had won a scholarship to study art and architecture. After two years there, discouraged by the hostile attitude of many white students toward him, he left and enrolled at the Harlem Community Art Center on 125th Street, where he pursued painting while also using his brushes to make signs for the Works Progress Administration. After a stint in the Army during World War II, he returned to New York and left painting behind for printmaking, which he juggled with a job in commercial illustration.

 

But soon his field work with a camera, meant to feed his printmaking, became his primary interest, and he joined the great postwar street photography world, where practitioners like Helen Levitt, William Klein and Lisette Model were at work with their 35-millimeter rangefinders.

 

Mr. DeCarava (pronounced dee-cuh-RAV-ah) told Charlie Rose in a televised interview in 1996 that photography was an ideal way to get at the directness he desired from art. “Going outside and meeting the challenge of taking what is and making it yours, that’s what photography does for me,” he said. “It’s not the subject that interests me as much as my perception of the subject.”

 

Avoiding flash whenever he could, his pictures explored the nuances of shadow perhaps more than any other photographer of his day. The critic Vicki Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, described his best work as “bafflingly dark, suffused with stillness,” adding: “DeCarava reads the city’s small secrets as it goes about its business unawares, and comes in so close that everything outside his concentration falls away.”

 

The $3,200 he received from his Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to shoot in Harlem full time. Steichen used some of Mr. DeCarava’s work in the landmark “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. At the same time — after he had approached Hughes for help in finding a publisher — he published “Sweet Flypaper of Life,” which uses his work with Hughes’s prose poetry to weave a fictional narrative of Harlem life as told by a grandmother named Sister Mary Bradley.

 

Around the same time, he embarked on a years-long project of photographing jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Thelonious Monk at work and at rest. He was drawn to his subjects, he once said, not only because of his love of the music, but also because of the affinities he saw between jazz and photography, both of which depend on the understanding that “in between that one-fifteenth of a second, there is a thickness.”

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Like many photographers who came of age in the 1940s and ’50s, he fought to win full recognition of photography by museums and galleries. For two years in the mid-’50s, he turned an apartment where he lived on the Upper West Side into a photo gallery, featuring exhibitions of work by artists like Harry Callahan and Minor White.

 

“From the broader art community recognition did come, albeit slowly, and sometimes at great cost,” wrote his wife, Sherry Turner DeCarava, whose three daughters with him, Susan, Wendy and Laura DeCarava, all of Brooklyn, also survive him. “His insistence that people recognize and treat photography properly, as a fine art, was ahead of many in his generation.”

 

But Mr. DeCarava struggled against barriers much more difficult to overcome. He was active in the Committee to End Discrimination Against Black Photographers and helped lead efforts like a protest against Life magazine, demanding that it address the lack of black photographers on its staff. But not everyone agreed with his approach. Gordon Parks, Life’s only black photographer in the 1960s, declined to endorse the protest and Mr. DeCarava never forgave him.

 

His first major solo museum exhibition did not come until 1969, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts for work that, as his citation said, “seized the attention of our nation while displaying the dignity and determination of his subjects.”

 

To support himself and his family, Mr. DeCarava worked for many years as a freelance magazine photographer for publications like Fortune and Newsweek.

 

In 1975, he became an associate professor at Hunter College and later a professor of art there, one not afraid to take things into his own hands. Over one Christmas vacation, as his wife recalled, he designed and built the first full-fledged undergraduate darkroom for the college’s art department. But he described his most significant contribution as trying to impart to his students a sense of photography’s unique power.

 

“It doesn’t have to be pretty to be true,” Mr. DeCarava said in a 2001 interview with the contemporary artist Dread Scott. “But if it’s true it’s beautiful. Truth is beautiful. And so my whole work is about what amounts to a reverence for life itself.”

 

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AMOS FERGUSON, OUTSIDER ARTIST OF THE BAHAMAS

 

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: October 29, 2009

 

Amos Ferguson, a folk artist known for his brilliantly colored Bible scenes and his depictions of the social rituals and the flora and fauna of the Bahamas, died on Oct. 19 at his niece’s home in Nassau. He was 89.

 

 

October 30, 2009

Galerie Bonheur

Amos Ferguson

 

October 30, 2009

National Art Gallery of the Bahamas

Jesus as depicted in a work by Amos Ferguson of the Bahamas.

 

The death was confirmed by Dr. Erica James, the director of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas.

 

Mr. Ferguson, a house painter by trade, did not turn to art until he was in his 40s, when, as he told the story, a nephew came to him and related a dream he had just had. Jesus, the nephew said, came out of the sea with a painting in his hands and said Mr. Ferguson was wasting his talent for painting.

 

Mr. Ferguson heeded the call and, painting with exterior enamel on cardboard, rendered Bible stories or Bahamian scenes in a vibrant Caribbean visual idiom. The work, sold at the Straw Market in Nassau, was discovered by a New York collector in the 1970s, and in 1985 the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford mounted the exhibition “Paint by Mr. Amos Ferguson” — taking the artist’s signature as the title.

 

Mr. Ferguson, previously unknown even to many Bahamians, leapt to the front ranks of the outsider-art genre.

 

“Until the 1950s or 1960s, we did not really have an artist who depicted us,” Ms. James said. “Amos was intuitive, but he tapped into the pulse of Bahamian culture. The seeming simplicity of the forms and the subjects gave him an audience abroad, and now here.”

 

Mr. Ferguson was born on Feb. 28, 1920, on the island of Exuma in the Bahamas. He was one of 14 children of a Baptist preacher and carpenter. At 14 he left home for Nassau, where he worked as an upholsterer, furniture finisher and house painter.

 

After receiving the call to become an artist, he set up at the foot of the bridge connecting Nassau to Paradise Island and began painting Bahamian scenes on cardboard sheets that his wife used in her basket making. When they failed to sell, he retreated to his house and concentrated on intensely personal religious paintings and brightly colored, joyous renderings of social rituals like the Junkanoo festival. He also liked to depict the island’s crabs, fish and flowers.

 

Beatrice, his wife, offered his paintings to tourists at the Straw Market, where she sold baskets and dolls. She died in 2000. He has no immediate survivors.

 

“He would paint on pizza boxes, shirt cardboard, drinking glasses, anything,” said Laurie Carmody Ahner, who sells Mr. Ferguson’s work at the Galerie Bonheur in St. Louis. “He was the ultimate recycler.”

 

The titles, with their shaky spelling and grammar, were evocative: “When I Was Nine Years Old I Dream About Black Crab and Snake,” “This Picture Is When Noah Was Bilding the Ark” or “Jesus Hung on the Cross for You Sin and My Sin. They Plat Crown of Tones and Place It on His Head.”

 

“I paint by faith, not by sight,” Mr. Ferguson often said.

 

He began showing at galleries in the Bahamas in 1972, but widespread recognition came to him after 1978, when Sukie Miller, an American collector, bought several of his paintings. She showed them to Ute Stebich, a dealer in Haitian art in Lenox, Mass.

 

The two women traveled to Nassau, photographed the work and sent slides to the Wadsworth Atheneum, hoping that the museum might acquire some paintings for its African Diaspora Collection. Instead, curators organized a show of 50 works, which brought Mr. Ferguson to the attention of the international art market. His images were later used to illustrate “Under the Sunday Tree” (1991), a collection of poems by Eloise Greenfield.

 

Exposure abroad helped win Mr. Ferguson new respect in the Bahamas, where fame had been slow to come. “Used to be, I could count the people in the Bahamas who understood my work,” he told United Press International in 1985. “But now they just believe and see what I’m doing. The eyes were in darkness. As time rolls on, they come into the light.”

 

In 2005 the street he lived on in Nassau was renamed Amos Ferguson Street. He continued painting even after his eyesight began to fail.

 

“To paint, the Lord gives you a vision, a sight that you go by,” he once told a reporter. “But don’t forget you have to see and check that Bible and don’t forget God. And the more you keep up with your Bible, and get the understanding, the better you paint.”

 

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

 

Dale Carnegie, Author, Dies at 66

(Nov. 1, 1955)

Bob Kane, the Cartoonist Who Created ‘Batman,’ Dies at 83

(Nov. 3, 1998)

Henri Matisse, One of France’s Greatest Painters, Dies at 84

(Nov. 3, 1954)

Cy Young, Famed Pitcher, Dies at 88

(Nov. 4, 1955)

Leonid Brezhnev, Former Soviet Leader, Dies at 75

(Nov. 10, 1982)

Jerome Kern, Noted Composer, Dies at 60

(Nov. 11, 1945)

Lucretia Mott, 19th-Century American Feminist, Dies at 87

(Nov. 11, 1880)

Percival Lowell, Astronomer and Author, Dies at 61

(Nov. 12, 1916)

Booker T. Washington, Founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Dies at 59

(Nov. 14, 1915)

Lionel Barrymore, Veteran Screen and Stage Star, Dies at 76

(Nov. 15, 1954)

Margaret Mead, Anthropologist and Author, Dies at 76

(Nov. 15, 1978)

Sam Rayburn, 79, Who Served 17 Years as House Speaker, Dies

(Nov. 16, 1961)

Francisco Franco, Whose Iron Hand Forged a Modern Spain, Dies at 82

(Nov. 20, 1975)

Gerard Swope, 84, Ex-G.E. Head, Dies

(Nov. 20, 1957)

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, Dies at 46

(Nov. 22, 1963)

Jack London, Novelist, Dies at 40

(Nov. 22, 1916)

Eugene O’Neill, Playwright Who Won Nobel Prize, Dies at 65

(Nov. 27, 1953)

Enrico Fermi, Architect of Atomic Bomb, Dies at 53

(Nov. 28, 1954)