THE MIND OF THE RACIST WHITE SUPREMACIST: THE RACIST WHITE WOMAN

Racism is Satan’s form of vanity taken to its negative extreme. The narcissistic element in racism places Whites on a pedestal that serves as a point of comparison for so-called Other races to work toward imitating. This translates into the use of Black images as an antithesis to Whiteness. Black people routinely get used and discarded when they are signaled out as validation of whose racial image is superior. Our sense of racial love is reminiscent of the mythical Greek figure of Narcissus, a man too involved in his own reflection to even notice that his disturbing image of self-love is based on an image that he captured of himself in a pool of water. Since the water’s surface was incapable of letting him caress and embrace his own image, Narcissus died a broken and pitiful man.

If White women are the pinnacles of beauty, then Black women are the alter-ego. In a world where women are unfairly divided as whores and saints, Black women become the Mary Magdalenes of female desirability. Like Mary Magdalene, they are the outsiders who are misunderstood by the mainstream. While White women are comparatively sheltered, Black women see first hand the ugly and vile fantasies and realities that only reveal themselves on a race that Whites believe are most expendable. The race of Mary Magdalene may see and receive mankind’s ugliest requests, but they also see and receive the beauty that the Son of God showed specifically to Mary Magdalene due to the fact that her race was the first to see the depths of sin and redemption.

Big Little White Lies: Our Attempt to White-Out America, by Carol Chehade, Nehmarche Publishing, Inc. 2001, pg. 120, pg. 142.

The White man this. The White man that.

Yeah, the whole White man is the only white person who has brutalized Black people that has been run into the ground ad nauseam.

Wrong.

White men do not hold a monopoly on racist white supremacy hatred. They have had help from White women plenty of times.

Who else was the teacher of White children in the white home?

Who else spends the most time with the White child in the gated-, segregated-, gentrified white communities?

Who has been the incubator of the Black community’s arch enemy?

Yeah, you guessed it right.

The oft-told lie that White women are less racist than White men is the sadistic trope that has allowed White women to get away with murder, time and time again.

 

As for so-called White women sisterhood with Black women—-such a false myth has never existed. The many times they disregarded Black women’s pleas for their help in bringing an end to their men castrating and burning alive defenseless Black men.

 

The begging and pleading from millions of Black women to have White women step up and demand that White men stop the lynching of Black men and boys on the trumped up charges of rape. Only when Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell and so many Black women implored and asked for this brutality to cease did Jessie Daniel Ames and a few White women finally open their mouths after so many decades and silence in the face of the deaths of so many, many Black men.

The numerous times when they looked the other way and covered their ears to drown out the screams of pain and terror when their men raped, and tore to pieces the bodies of defenseless Black women and girls. The times they walked past enslaved Black women who were striped bare naked and put on the slave auction block. The times they took the lash into their own hands and whipped so many Black women and men, till the blood ran.

Civil War photo of Gordon (runaway slave and Union soldier) at the Baton Rouge Union camp during his medical examination. McPherson and Oliver’s photograph of Gordon’s scarred back

Oh yes, and the times when they beat to death and broke the bodies of little innocent children because they did not move fast enough, did not clean the silverware spotless enough, did not say “Yes, ma’am” deferentially enough.

Especially f they were the White slave master’s children. Little innocent children beaten, flayed and tormented savagely because through no fault of their own they were the progeny of her rapist, brutish White husband.

Especially if they were the children of racist White men during Jane Crow segregation. Little children abandoned and left to starve and be mistreated under a regime of terrorism that crushed the rights and humanity of children whose White fathers considered them nigger bastards before the world.

So-called solidarity between Black women and White women?

Where were you?

Never, ever did White women open up their mouths and demand that White men cease their sadistic and perverted rapes and filthy atrocities against millions of innocent and defenseless Black women and little Black girls.

Where were you?

Never did White women stand up for and in defense of Black women and girls during Reconstruction and during Jane Crow segregation. The message sent loud and clear was that the bodies and minds of Black women were so much fodder for the destruction of their bodies and the preservation of White women’s bodies. The message sent to Black women from White women was succinct and clear: “Better you than me. Better that you be broken and torn apart in the hands of vicious White men, so as to save us White women from the bestiality that would befall us white women were it not for cruelties done to so many Black women and little Black girl children.”

 

Where were you, White women?

Where were you, White women, when Sandra Bland died?

Where were you, White women, when Rekia Boyd died?

Where you White women, when Eleanor Bumpers, Korryn Gaines, Tanisha Anderson, Yvette Smith, Miriam Carey, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones were all slaughtered by racist gun-toting-badge-wearing race soldiers?

But, you couldn’t wait to grab Black women (those of them who meekly succumbed to your demands) to join you in your imitation-of-the March-on-Washington “Women’s March”?

Just a week after 53% of you voted for Donald Trump after his pussy-grabbing-misogynoir bleats.

In 2017, White women can still pull a Bethany Storro on Black women. In 2017, White women can still pull a Susan Smith on Black men. In 2017, White women can still lie down and cry rape. In 2017, White women can slum around in the gutter and still be exalted above every decent Black woman in the world. In 2017, White women, no matter whether she be a prostitute, a drunk driver hit-and-run murderer, a PTA mom, a SAHM, a Secretary of State, or married to the President of the United States, they will always have more value than a Black woman or girl, in the eyes of millions of racist white supremacy men who have bought into the lie that White women are better than Black women.

White women are less racist than White men?

Tell that to the fools who refuse to learn and know their history.

White women who have lived in the den of racist white supremacy and managed to come out not exposed to the power and brutality of racist white supremacy?

No such creature exists.

GEORGIA POLICE CHIEF APOLOGIZES 76 YEARS AFTER LYNCHING OF AUSTIN CALLAWAY

 

CBS News January 27, 2017, 3:10 AM

Georgia police chief apologizes 76 years after lynching

Lagrange, Georgia Police Chief Lou Dekmar apologizing on night of January 26, 2017 for failure lof his department to protect black man Austin Galloway before he was lynched some 76 years ago

WRBL-TV

•  

LAGRANGE, Ga. – Police Chief Lou Dekmar publicly apologized Thursday night more than 76 years after the brutal slaying of a black man here.

Dekmar publicly apologized for the lack of protection given to Austin Calloway when he was shot to death in 1940, reports CBS Columbus, Georgia affiliate WRBL-TV.

Dekmar says the path to the apology began when an investigator told him two elderly African-American women pointed to a historical picture saying, “They killed our people a few years ago.”

He says that in September, 1940, a group of armed, masked men took Austin Callaway from a jail and drove him away.

The next morning, a passerby found Callaway bleeding to death from gunshot wounds. He died hours later.

“What was done was wrong,” Dekmar told a diverse crowd in a Methodist church.

He apologized for the police department’s lack of response concerning the 18 year old’s murder.

“I, on behalf of the Lagrange Police Department and the city of Lagrange, want to acknowledge the police department’s failure to take crucial action in its obligation to protect Austin Callaway on September 8, 1940,” he said.

“An acknowledgment and apology is necessary to aid in healing wounds of past brutalities and injustice,” he continued.

Callaway’s family was there for the apology, including his second cousin, Glenn Dowell.

“Here comes Lagrange, Georgia, which has previously been kind of an oligarchy, ruled by an oligarchy in the community, changing. It has changed for the best,” Dowell said.

He described it as an emotional night, saying, “The tensions in the African-American (are) super-high because they’ve never seen anything like this in Lagrange before. They’ve never seen anything like this.”

Dekmar said the apology works toward bringing a deeper trust between the community and public safety officers.

“This is just one more step that is a significant step, but it’s not the concluding step,” Dekmar remarked to WRBL.

The local NAACP announced that its members accept Dekmar’s apology.

Dekamr’s mayor and some other city officials also spoke.

© 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SOURCE

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It is so easy to apologize and expect everything to just be hunky-dory.

Well, it is not.

Young Austin Callaway had his life brutally taken from him and what good would an apology do?

Is the tired old “we so sorry, now hurry up and forgive us” tripe expected to be asked?

There are not enough apologies and begging for forgiveness that can ever give justice to this young man who had a right to live.

This young man whose life were  taken by terrorist, brutish and sadistic murderers who were able to live their lives out.

As for apologies…………….

……………..you know what you can do with them.

And don’t expect any damn forgiveness.

IN REMEMBRANCE: 1-29-2017

MARY TYLER MOORE, WHO INCARNATED THE MODERN WOMAN

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

JAN. 25, 2017

 How Mary Tyler Moore Changed Television

Mary Tyler Moore brought a new depiction of the American woman to both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Virginia Heffernan, a contributing writer for The New York Times, discusses Ms. Moore’s roles and their influence.

By ROBIN LINDSAY and VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN on Publish Date January 25, 2017. . Watch in Times Video » 

Mary Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. She was 80.

Her family said her death, at Greenwich Hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.

Ms. Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People” as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Broadcast from 1970 to 1977, it was produced by both Ms. Moore and her second husband, Grant Tinker, who later ran NBC and who died on Nov. 28.

At least a decade before the twin figures of the harried working woman and the neurotic, unwed 30-something became media preoccupations, Ms. Moore’s portrayal — for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards — expressed both the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman who could plot her own course without reference to cultural archetypes.

The show, and her portrayal of Mary as a sisterly presence in the office, as well as a source of ingenuity and humor, was a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the work force.

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It modeled a productive style of coed collegiality, with Ms. Moore teasing out the various ironies known to any smart woman trying to keep from cracking up in a world of scowling male bosses and preening male soloists.

Slide Show

 

Slide Show|12 Photos

Mary Tyler Moore

CreditCBS, via Associated Press

“Mary Tyler Moore became a feminist icon as Mary Richards,” said Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, the author of “Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic.”

“She only wanted to play a great character, and she did so. That character also happened to be single, female, over 30, professional, independent, and not particularly obsessed with getting married. Mary had America facing such issues as equal pay, birth control, and sexual independence way back in the ’70s.”

The influence of Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards can be seen in the performances of almost all the great female sitcom stars who followed her, from Jennifer Aniston to Debra Messing to Tina Fey, who has said that she developed her acclaimed sitcom “30 Rock” and her character, the harried television writer Liz Lemon, by watching episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Many nonactresses also said that Ms. Moore — by playing a working single woman with such compassion and brio — inspired their performances in real life.

Ms. Moore had earlier, in a decidedly different era, played another beloved television character: Laura Petrie, the stylish wife of the comedy writer played by Dick Van Dyke on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Also on CBS, the show ran from 1961 to 1966.

Ms. Moore was the lesser star in those days, but she shared Mr. Van Dyke’s background in song and dance, and as a comedy duo they magnified each other’s charm. Ms. Moore transformed and tamed the vaudeville style that had dominated sitcoms, perfecting a comic housewifely hysteria in Laura, made visible in the way she often appeared to be fighting back tears. Her “Dick Van Dyke Show” performance won her two Emmys.

“I heard something in her voice that got to me,” Carl Reiner, who created and produced the show, once said. “I think the fact that Mary and Dick were dancers gave the whole program a grace that very few programs have.”

Mary Tyler Moore was born on Dec. 29, 1936, in Brooklyn Heights. After living in Queens and Brooklyn, her family moved to California when she was 8. Her father, George Tyler Moore, a clerk, and her mother, the former Margery Hackett, were both alcoholics and, Ms. Moore often said, imperfect parents. The eldest of their three children, Mary would outlive both her sister, Elizabeth Moore, who died of a drug and alcohol overdose in 1978, and her brother, John Hackett Moore, who died of cancer in 1992 after Ms. Moore had assisted him in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

While she was still a child in Los Angeles, Ms. Moore arranged to live with an aunt, choosing to see her parents only on special occasions.

At 17, she was hired to appear in a series of commercials for Hotpoint appliances in the role of Happy Hotpoint, a caped dancing elf in a body stocking. The ad was shown during episodes of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

Mary Tyler Moore Dancing as Happy Hotpoint (1956) – Classic TV Commercial Video by All Classic Video

In 1955, she married Richard Meeker, a salesman. That same year, she became pregnant, which compromised her effectiveness as an androgynous elf in a fitted costume. Her only child, Richard Jr., was born in 1956. He died in 1980 when a gun with a hair trigger went off in his hands; the gun model was later removed from the market.

After the birth of her son, Ms. Moore danced in various television shows before turning to acting. She had small parts on series like “Bourbon Street Beat,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Steve Canyon” and “Hawaiian Eye.” As the answering-service girl Sam on “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” she was more heard than seen: Her character existed only in sexy close-ups of parts of her body, including her mouth, her hands and her elegant legs.

It was another body part, her nose, that was said to have disqualified her from playing Danny Thomas’s daughter on his sitcom “Make Room for Daddy.” She was up for the role, but Mr. Thomas, who took pride in his exaggerated features, decided that her nose was too small to belong to a member of his family.

“The Dick Van Dyke Show” made Ms. Moore, who looked sylphlike in capri pants, a sensation. At Mr. Van Dyke’s behest, however, the series ended in 1966, at the height of its popularity.

Ms. Moore’s marriage to Mr. Meeker had dissolved by 1961, and she met Mr. Tinker, who was then an executive at 20th Century Fox, in 1962. They were married, in Las Vegas, the same year. Together they formed MTM Enterprises, and in the late ’60s, they hit upon an idea for a custom-made showcase.

Mary Tyler Moore in 1970 before the premiere of her television series “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Credit Associated Press

MTM’s on-air mascot was a meowing kitten, whose image evoked, and gently satirized, MGM’s roaring lion, and the branding clicked. Mr. Tinker and Ms. Moore pitched a show to CBS about a recently divorced woman who was working and living on her own, and the network liked it.

The executives’ only reservation concerned the subject of divorce, which was still forbidden on network television. Some even feared that viewers would assume that Laura Petrie, from “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” had divorced Rob, which was unthinkable. A solution was reached: Ms. Moore’s character would be newly single but not divorced, having recently broken up with a fiancé.

In the show, Mary Richards was an associate news producer at WJM, a local television station in Minneapolis. Ed Asner played her boss, Lou Grant, who was gruff, though essentially tenderhearted; Gavin MacLeod was Murray Slaughter, a news writer with a boring life; Ted Knight was the vain, dimwit anchorman, Ted Baxter.

The female characters, as finely drawn as the men, were Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), Mary’s neighbor, also single; Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman), Mary’s manipulative landlady; Georgette Franklin (Georgia Engel), Ted’s baby-voiced girlfriend (and later his wife); and Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White), the husband-stealing hostess of “The Happy Homemaker.”

That Rhoda was Jewish — as was Lou, the show sometimes implied — was unusual for network television at the time. Similarly novel were hints that Mary was sexually active.

The characters all revolved around Mary, whose naïveté and enthusiasm supplied a generous assist for the others’ eccentricities. Just as she had on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Ms. Moore could always make a joke her own when she needed to — and the episodes that put Mary’s humor center stage were the best.

In “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” which is on many lists of the best television episodes of all time (TV Guide ranked it No. 3), Mary is appalled by her colleagues’ irreverent response to the undignified death of Chuckles the Clown, the host of a children’s show on their station. But at his funeral, it’s she who can’t control her giggles. Her struggle to suppress laughter is a comic tour de force. (David Lloyd won an Emmy for writing the episode, one of 29 the show won over all.)

Chuckles the Clown’s Funeral – the Mary Tyler Moore Show Video by IfIWereEvil

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which forsook the gag-a-minute sitcom formula in favor of more character-driven humor, soon became one of the most popular shows in television history, aided only partly by its position in CBS’s winning Saturday-night lineup, which also included “M*A*S*H*,” “All in the Family” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”

On “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Ms. Moore played Laura Petrie, the stylish wife of a comedy writer played by Dick Van Dyke. Credit Don Brin/Associated Press

The writers and producers who worked on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” went on to develop a raft of other hit sitcoms, including “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “The Simpsons.”

Among the show’s many memorable flourishes was its theme song, “Love Is All Around,” written and performed by Sonny Curtis. The lyrics were rewritten after the first season. The opening lines — “How will you make it on your own?/This world is awfully big, and girl, this time you’re all alone” — were revised to reflect the show’s optimism and devotion to its star:

“Who can turn the world on with her smile?/Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”

The adorableness of Mary Richards as a character — with her pluck and her world-brightening smile — was a mixed blessing for Ms. Moore. After the show was canceled in 1977, she set out to demonstrate her range as an actress, choosing roles in television, theater and film that distanced her from the sweetheart characters for which she had become famous.

Her efforts paid off impressively in “Ordinary People.” Her performance as the stony, guilt-ridden mother Beth Jarrett brought her a Golden Globe award as well as the Academy Award nomination. Afterward she said she based the performance on her aloof father.

Robert Redford, who directed the movie, said he had cast Ms. Moore after seeing her walking alone on a beach and realizing that she had a serious side.

In the meantime, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” fractured into spinoffs: the sitcoms “Rhoda” and “Phyllis” and the acclaimed drama “Lou Grant,” a rare example of an hourlong series spun off from a half-hour sitcom.

Ms. Moore’s performance on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards, expressed the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman. Credit Pioneers of Television Archives, via PBS

This period represented a winning streak for MTM Enterprises, which was overseen almost exclusively by Mr. Tinker. The company produced not only those spinoffs but also the critical and popular hits “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Newhart,” “WKRP in Cincinnati,” “Hill Street Blues” “St. Elsewhere,” “Remington Steele” and “Rescue 911.”

On Broadway, MTM Enterprises produced Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off.”

In the 1980s, Ms. Moore admitted to having a drinking problem. It had started, she said, when she was starring in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and had finally reached untenable levels. (In 2000, Mr. Van Dyke told Larry King that he was also an alcoholic and that he had also started drinking heavily while working on the show.) Ms. Moore entered the Betty Ford Center for treatment in 1984.

She had had Type 1 diabetes since her 30s and in 2011 underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumor.

From the late 1970s into the ’80s, Ms. Moore had a string of lackluster, low-rated shows, including a 1978 variety hour, “Mary.” It lasted only three episodes and is notable mainly because David Letterman and Michael Keaton were among the regulars. It was followed that season by a hybrid variety-comedy show, “The Mary Tyler Moore Hour,” which was gone after 11 episodes. None of her shows in those years lasted more than one season.

She also sought roles that would let her express the gravitas she had shown in “Ordinary People.” In 1980, she was given a special Tony Award for her performance on Broadway as a quadriplegic who wanted to die in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?”

On television, she played a breast cancer survivor in “First You Cry,” Mary Todd Lincoln in “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” and the cruel director of an orphanage in “Stolen Babies,” for which she won her seventh Emmy.

In 1995, in an interview with The Times, Ms. Moore was asked if she resented being asked by reporters about Mary Richards. “I think some of them may be trying to find some way to instruct, or to make a judgment about, or in some way set themselves above me,” she said.

Ms. Moore in 2011 at her home in Connecticut. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“I’ve come to the point in my life where I don’t have to work,” she continued. “I work because I enjoy it. I only enjoy doing things that frighten me a little bit. And I am an actress. I think I am an actress as well as a personality. And I’ve got to keep the actress in me happy.”

In the 1996 movie “Flirting With Disaster,” Ms. Moore played with aplomb the mortifying adoptive mother of Ben Stiller’s character, who at one point lifts her shirt to show her son’s girlfriend how a bra should fit. In 2001, she was executive producer of a macabre television movie, “Like Mother Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes,” in which she also starred as the killer mom Sante.

She also became more willing to indulge in nostalgia. The 2001 television movie “Mary and Rhoda” brought Ms. Moore and Ms. Harper together again, playing older versions of their 1970s characters. (Mary was widowed, and Rhoda divorced.)

A more successful reunion came in 2003, when she starred with Mr. Van Dyke in a PBS adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Gin Game.” In 2004, she and Mr. Van Dyke reunited again on “The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited.”

She went on to make several guest appearances in 2006 as a TV host on “That ’70s Show,” which was shot on the soundstage that once belonged to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” In 2013, she was reunited with all four of her female “Mary Tyler Moore Show” co-stars on an episode of the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland,” whose cast included Betty White and Georgia Engel. Ms. Moore at last seemed to accept and even embrace the pop significance of the Mary Richards era.

In 2012, the Screen Actors Guild gave Ms. Moore a lifetime achievement award. Ms. Moore and Mr. Tinker divorced in 1981, although they remained friends. In 1983, she married Dr. Robert Levine, a physician, who is her only immediate survivor. The couple lived in Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn.

Outside her performing career, she was chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and spoke openly about her own struggle with the disease, diagnosed in the 1960s. A vegetarian, she was also an outspoken proponent of animal welfare, and she established funds for arts scholarships.

The airborne tam o’shanter that appears in a freeze frame at the end of the opening credits on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” came to symbolize the here-goes-nothingism that Mary Richards, as well as Mary Tyler Moore, always conveyed. In 2002, a statue showing Ms. Moore tossing the hat was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis.

Correction: January 25, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the network that Ms. Moore’s ex-husband Grant Tinker ran. It was NBC, not CBS.

Correction: January 28, 2017
An obituary on Thursday about Mary Tyler Moore misspelled the surname of the actor who played Murray Slaughter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He is Gavin MacLeod, not McLeod. Because of an editing error, the obituary referred imprecisely to the Tony Award Ms. Moore received in 1980 for her performance in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” She was given a special Tony; she did not win in a competitive acting category. And because of another editing error, the obituary gave outdated information about where Ms. Moore and her husband, Dr. Robert Levine, lived. They had a home in Greenwich, Conn.; they no longer lived on a farm in upstate New York.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

SOURCE

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JOHN HURT, BRITISH ACTOR HAILED FOR HIS SHAPE-SHIFTING ROLES

By BRUCE WEBER

JAN. 27, 2017

Mr. Hurt in “Krapp’s Last Tape” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in 2011. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

John Hurt, an unprepossessing British character actor who vanished inside dozens of roles, from Shakespeare to science fiction, including John Merrick, the hideously deformed title character in the 1980 film “The Elephant Man,” died on Wednesday in Norfolk, England. He was 77.

His wife, Anwen Hurt, confirmed his death. In June 2015, Mr. Hurt disclosed that he had pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Hurt was a rising stage actor in England in the 1960s but spent most of the remainder of his career compiling a long résumé in movies and on television. A chameleon of a performer, physically unimposing but with a rich, melodic voice, he played a number of leading roles, though he could never be described as a leading man. Critics often seemed challenged to explain the appeal of his presence.

In “The Naked Civil Servant” (1975), seen first on television in England, he was Quentin Crisp, a flame-haired raconteur and social butterfly whose forthright flamboyance as a gay man helped push the acceptance of homosexuality in Britain.

Mr. Hurt after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle in London in 2015. Credit Pool photo by Steve Parsons

In a 1979 BBC mini-series, he was Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the brooding, conscience-stricken killer in “Crime and Punishment.” And in Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984,” he was Winston Smith, the protagonist. Mr. Hurt’s pallor, fearful expression and prominent ears made him an especially feral and unromantic rebel.

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  Watch John Hurt in His Most Memorable Roles JAN. 27, 2017

“His countenance is fishy and bizarre,” Cintra Wilson wrote in Salon in 2004. “He has dark, verminous little eyes, a smirky little mouth full of nicotine-varnished teeth, and that British complexion that evokes a poached worm. Even in his early films, he has eye bags and looks like he put on a face that was at the very bottom of his laundry basket. His body, when it isn’t a little overindulged around the abdomen, is scrawny. He has never, in any role, looked particularly masculine. The characters he plays are generally weak, immoral, murderous, slimy or insane. Yet to gaze upon John Hurt, in almost any role, is to feel a drooly adoration; he is irresistible.”

Frequently cast in fantasy films as a credibly real character, Mr. Hurt could be kindly or cruel. He was the wand expert, Mr. Ollivander, in several Harry Potter films, and the führer-like dictator of a barely familiar England in the futuristic “V for Vendetta” (2005).

Mr. Hurt slipped so easily into makeup that it often seemed a form of disguise. Professorially bearded with a Brillo pad of silver hair, he was almost unrecognizable as Trevor Bruttenholm, the British paranormal expert who discovers the young title demon in the sci-fi thriller “Hellboy” (2004).

In “The Elephant Man,” a film that also starred Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft (it had no connection with Bernard Pomerance’s stage play of the same name), Mr. Hurt found the apotheosis of this quality, the subordination of his own physical being to the character’s. In the role of John Merrick, which required hours of makeup application before each day’s filming, he was unrecognizable as the monstrous-looking but gentle sufferer of a rare affliction that enlarged his head, twisted his musculature and hampered his speech and mobility.

Mr. Hurt, center, in a scene from “Alien” (1979), directed by Ridley Scott. Credit Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images

For the calm dignity he brought to this performance — a powerful reproof to those who demonized and humiliated Merrick — Mr. Hurt was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for best actor, critical plaudits and the admiration of the film’s director, David Lynch, who said 10 years later, in an interview in The New York Times Magazine: “John Hurt is simply the greatest actor in the world.” (Robert De Niro won the best actor award in 1981.)

Though Mr. Hurt was more familiar to audiences in Britain, where he was knighted in 2015, his work there found its way to recognition across the Atlantic as well. He appeared as Richard Rich, a young man in pre-Elizabethan England who yields to his ambition and betrays Sir Thomas More in the film “A Man for All Seasons” (1966). In 1983, he gave an acclaimed performance as the Fool in a television production of “King Lear,” with Laurence Olivier in the title role.

And in “Scandal” (1989), he played an affable go-between who paired pretty girls with powerful men in a true-story, tabloid-fodder episode known as the Profumo affair, which ended the career of Britain’s secretary of state for war, John Profumo, and tainted the conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Mr. Hurt began appearing with greater frequency in American films in the late 1970s. The spur was the American broadcast, on PBS, of “I, Claudius,” a BBC series based on Robert Graves’s novels about the Roman empire. Mr. Hurt played the depraved, bloodthirsty emperor Caligula.

Some of his movie parts were in Hollywood trifles; in one, “King Ralph” (1991), he was the stodgily irate English opposition to the ascension to the English throne of an American yokel (John Goodman). But even before “The Elephant Man,” he was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as a self-lacerating drug addict imprisoned in Turkey in “Midnight Express” (1978).

Mr. Hurt as John Merrick in “The Elephant Man” (1980). Credit Photofest

Mr. Hurt achieved cult status in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” in 1979 as Kane, the first victim of the title space creature, who emerges bloodily from his chest. Testament to his appeal as a sacrificial lamb, it was one of many gruesome deaths Mr. Hurt suffered on film; he was stabbed, shot, hanged and burned to a crisp, all more than once. Indeed, in “Spaceballs,” Mel Brooks’s 1987 spoof, he reprised Kane’s death: As the little monster explodes from his rib cage, he says with some exasperation, “Oh, no, not again.”

John Vincent Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, on Jan. 22, 1940. His father was an Anglican clergyman; his mother an engineer.

John appeared in school plays, often in female roles because, he said, he was small and his voice was high. His parents approved of his acting, but not as a profession — “They thought it represented something risqué and populist; it was out of the question,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1990 — and they sent him to art school instead.

He later auditioned for and was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He made his film debut in 1962 in “The Wild and the Willing,” a drama about academic life in which he played the feckless roommate of a rebellious student played by Ian McShane. The same year, he appeared onstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company in “Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger,” a controversial work that ended with the gratuitous killing of a child.

Through the 1960s and early ’70s, his London stage credits included Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” and “The Dumb Waiter”; Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties”; and John Osborne’s “Inadmissible Evidence,” which starred Nicol Williamson.

John Hurt at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014. Credit Ian Gavan/Getty Images

His film credits during this time included the lead role in “Sinful Davey” (1969), a John Huston film based on the autobiography of a 19th-century Scottish rogue; and “10 Rillington Place,” a 1971 drama based on the crimes of a real-life London serial killer, John Christie. Mr. Hurt played Timothy Evans, who in 1950 was wrongly convicted of some of Mr. Christie’s crimes and executed.

His theater career had a resurgence in the 1990s. He appeared in London in Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” with Helen Mirren. Later, at the Gate Theater in Dublin, he took on the title (and only) role in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Samuel Beckett’s nostalgia-eviscerating portrait of a 69-year-old man revisiting his earlier life by means of listening to an old tape recording. It became a signature role. He performed it in London and appeared in a film version, directed by Atom Egoyan, before making his New York theatrical debut with it at age 71 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011.

“By now Mr. Hurt has the crusty Krapp thoroughly in his well-versed actor’s bones, and there isn’t a moment in his performance in which he is not fully inhabiting the corroded soul of the unforgettable character,” Charles Isherwood, who had seen Mr. Hurt in the role in London 11 years earlier, wrote in The New York Times. “The performance has only grown more prickly, funny and moving with age.”

Like many a British actor of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Hurt was known as a tippler, and his personal life was touched by tragedy. His partner of many years, the French model Marie-Lise Volpelière-Pierrot, was killed in a riding accident in 1983. He was divorced three times. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Alexander and Nicholas.

Mr. Hurt’s other film roles include a cross-dresser called the Countess in an adaptation of Tom Robbins’s picaresque novel “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1993); Professor Oxley, an archaeologist pal of the title character (Harrison Ford) in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008); the head of British intelligence, known only as Control, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011), from the John le Carré novel; and a Roman Catholic priest in “Jackie” (2016).

“When I say that acting is just a rather more sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians, it’s my way of trying to quash all the pretentious crap that’s said about acting,” Mr. Hurt said in 1990. “What I mean is, if you pretend well enough, the audience will believe you.”

He added: “In front of the camera you try to do subtle, telling things and hope the director, and the camera, notices. You can feel when you pass something through the camera. The old Alan Ladd story is the best one in that respect. He came back from a long day of shooting out in the dusty Arizona desert and someone said, ‘Did you have a good day, Alan?’ In his soft rasp, he said, ‘Yup, a couple of good looks.’”

Correction: January 28, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated when and where John Hurt died. He died on Wednesday in Norfolk, England, not on Friday in London.

Christopher Mele contributed reporting.

SOURCE

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MIKE CONNORS, LONG-RUNNING SLEUTH IN ‘MANNIX’

By ERIC GRODEJAN. 27, 2017

 

Mike Connors as the detective in “Mannix,” which started in 1967 and became the era’s most popular crime series. Credit CBS Photo Archive

Mike Connors, who broke free of years of supporting roles when he found stardom in the late 1960s as a maverick private investigator on the CBS series “Mannix,” which went on to enjoy an eight-season run, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 91.

His son-in-law Mike Condon said the death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of leukemia, which had been diagnosed a week earlier, The Associated Press reported.

In the series, which had its premiere in 1967, Mr. Connors played the darkly handsome Joe Mannix, a Korean War veteran of (like Mr. Connors) Armenian descent who sleuthed his way around Los Angeles with flashy cars and a penchant for citing Armenian proverbs.

Unlike many a smooth TV private eye, Mannix took his lumps. The Washington Post, tabulating the wear and tear the character withstood over eight seasons, found that he had endured 17 gunshot wounds and 55 beatings that left him unconscious.

The violence drew criticism in some quarters, but “Mannix” became the most popular crime series on television in an era punctuated by comedies like “All in the Family” and “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” For several years it shared CBS’s Saturday night lineup with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” whose own star died on Wednesday.

“Mannix” made Mr. Connors one of the highest-paid television actors of the 1970s; by the end of its run he was earning $40,000 an episode (almost $180,000 in today’s dollars). The role brought him four Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award.

“Mannix” was also notable as one of the first regular series to provide a leading role to an African-American: Gail Fisher joined the show in its second season as Mannix’s secretary, frequent damsel in distress and occasional potential love interest. She died at 65 in 2000.

Mr. Connors was born Krekor Ohanian on Aug. 15, 1925, in Fresno, Calif. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, then enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he played basketball on a scholarship, earning the nickname “Touch” on the court. His father was a lawyer, many of whose clients were poor and would often pay him with fruit, vegetables or chickens, Mr. Connors told an interviewer.

His plans to study law were interrupted when the director William A. Wellman saw him on the basketball court and encouraged him to try acting. One of his first film roles was in Wellman’s 1953 adventure film, “Island in the Sky,” which starred John Wayne.

Under the name Touch Connors, he appeared in several low-budget B-movies (“Swamp Women,” “Flesh and the Spur”), many of them for the director Roger Corman, and at least one enduring film: “The Ten Commandments” (1956), in which he played a herder.

He bounced between film and television for much of the 1950s, appearing on numerous series, including “The Millionaire,” “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun — Will Travel.” He was also persuaded to change his first name to Michael and then Mike.

In 1959 Mr. Connors landed a lead role on the series “Tightrope,” on which he played an undercover agent with one revolver in his shoulder holster and another hidden behind his back. It received good ratings but was canceled after one season; complaints about excessive violence were cited as one factor — an issue that would resurface in “Mannix.”

The 1960s brought him more guest-starring roles on television (“The Untouchables,” “Perry Mason,” “The Red Skelton Hour”) as well as movie parts (supporting roles in “Harlow” and “Stagecoach” and a leading role in the panned spy-movie spoof “Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die”).

Then came “Mannix.” During its run Lucille Ball and Mr. Connors produced a crossover episode of her sitcom “Here’s Lucy,” titled “Lucy and Mannix Are Held Hostage.”

Mr. Connors used his fame from “Mannix” to publicize a then-underreported chapter in Armenian history by narrating “The Forgotten Genocide,” J. Michael Hagopian’s 1975 documentary about the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He later narrated another Armenian-themed documentary, “Ararat Beckons,” by the same director.

He had another leading role in 1981, on the ABC crime series “Today’s FBI,” which lasted only one season. The rest of the 1980s and ’90s brought more TV guest appearances (“The Love Boat,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Walker, Texas Ranger,” “Diagnosis: Murder,” in which he and several of his “Mannix” co-stars reprised their characters); parts on mini-series including “War and Remembrance,” based on the Herman Wouk novel; and various roles in films and TV movies.

He also appeared on a 2007 episode of the sitcom “Two and a Half Men.”

He is survived by Mary Lou Wells, his wife of 67 years; a daughter, Dena; and a granddaughter.

In talking about his career with Tom Weaver for the 2003 book “Eye on Science Fiction: 20 Interviews With Classic SF and Horror Filmmakers,” Mr. Connors recalled the 1950s as a time of both ambition and dreams deferred.

“My favorite actors in those days were Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Bill Holden,” he said, adding that he had admired them for their “natural-type acting” and had wished for roles like theirs.

“I knew the type of acting I liked — that very natural type of acting,” he said, “but I just wanted to be successful. So, whatever. I was willing to do anything that they’d hire me for.”

Correction: January 27, 2017
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Mr. Connors’s military service during World War II. He served in the Army Air Forces — not in the United States Air Force, which was established in 1947.SOURCE

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CHUCK STEWART, PIONEERING PHOTOGRAPHER

Jim Beckerman , Staff Writer@jimbeckerman1 Published 8:56 p.m. ET Jan. 23, 2017 | Updated 4:24 p.m. ET Jan. 25, 2017

Award-winning jazz photographer Chuck Stewart(Photo: File photo)

Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Ray Charles, Gil-Scott Heron, Judy Garland, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Led Zeppelin, John Coltrane, Quincy Jones and Albert Einstein are just some of the celebrities that the award-winning Teaneck photographer Chuck Stewart captured at just the right moment.

Stewart, who died Friday at the age of 89, was fond of explaining that this was the difference between himself and the paparazzi — who always try to get celebrities at just the wrong moment.

“When I was photographing these people, I was looking for something that would make them look good,” he told The Record in 2010. “I didn’t want them picking their nose or scratching their behind. It was important to me that I take a picture of a person in a manner that I thought they looked best.”

That may be why Stewart’s photos can be seen on some 2,000 album covers, as well as books  (including his own, “Jazz Files,” and Leonard Feather’s landmark “Encyclopedia of Jazz”), magazines and newspapers like Esquire, Down Beat, Paris Match and The New York Times. His work was exhibited at Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian. He won the Milt Hinton Excellence in Jazz Award, and a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Journalists Association.

Stewart, who had been ailing for some time, died at Teaneck’s Holy Name Medical Center, said his daughter-in-law, Kim Stewart. “He died peacefully in his sleep,” she said. “He would have been 90 in May.”

For more than 50 years, Stewart lived in the Teaneck house he moved into in 1965, equipped with an upright piano he never learned to play (“I took lessons for eight years, and when I was through I couldn’t play ‘Chopsticks,’ ” he said) and some handsome tables, lamps and carpeting that — in some cases — came as perks for various photo assignments.

“He was charming, he was witty, and he was a very humble man,” Kim Stewart said. “He always said the best education is traveling the world — to experience the culture and food, and see as much as you can. That’s something he had instilled in us, and shared with the kids.”

His career, his travels, his “gets” with big celebrities and world figures would have been a remarkable run for anyone. But in addition to everything else, Stewart was a trailblazer: the first African-American pro photographer that most of his editors and clients, back in the 1940s and ’50s, had ever seen. Even if he got pigeonholed, more often than not, as a “jazz” photographer.

“If [my colleagues] were white, they moved up,” he said. “I was stuck in this genre. But I don’t have any regrets, because I was able to take care of a wife, three kids, a mother-in-law and a dog.”

Texas-born and Arizona-raised, Stewart made money the first day he snapped a picture.

He was 13 when the great contralto Marian Anderson visited his school. This was just a year after she had made history with her famous 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt after the DAR had famously denied her permission to sing in Constitution Hall for a mixed-race audience. Stewart, who had just gotten a Brownie box camera for his birthday, snapped some pictures of the visiting celebrity.

“When the pictures came back from the drugstore, everybody wanted some, so I made two dollars,” he recalled. “I was getting a quarter a week allowance. So I said, ‘Whoa, this is for me.’ ”

Later he majored in photography at Ohio University (the only other school in the 1940s with a photography major, the University of Houston, did not admit black students). Then Stewart made the acquaintance of Herman Leonard, later a pupil of the great Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh and a great jazz photographer in his own right.

 

Miles Davis, portrait by Chuck Stewart (Photo: Edward Harris)

It was through Leonard that Stewart eventually went to New York in 1949 and began photographing jazz and R&B greats for some of the best-known labels of the period: Mercury, Impulse, Verve, Argo, Chess, Reprise.

“The breadth of his work was almost overwhelming,” said Edward Harris, a Washington, D.C., documentary filmmaker whose film about Stewart (working title: “The Decisive Moment: The Portrait of a Photographer”) should be making the film festival rounds next summer. “He’s got Cannonball (Adderley) playing with Miles Davis, he’s got Thelonious (Monk), he’s got all these amazing jazz artists, but he’s also done some amazing portrait work. The stuff he did with Duke Ellington is absolutely breathtaking.”

Jazz wasn’t Stewart’s only beat. As a military photographer in the 1940s, he was the only black photographer cleared to shoot early tests of the atom bomb. He snapped pictures of rock and country musicians, TV and film personalities, and politicians. He was part of the Beatles’ entourage when they first came to America in 1964, but asked to be reassigned after rabid fans kept pulling and pinching him. “There are no black Beatles — why are you grabbing me?” he he complained.

“After they tore his clothes and stuff, he told the editors he wanted something more civilized,” Harris recalled. “That’s how he ended up with Guy Lombardo.”

Stewart is survived by three adult children — David, Marsha and Christopher —  seven grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. Services (viewing at 10 a.m., service at 11) will be Jan. 27 at Community Baptist Church, 224 First St., Englewood.

Billie Holiday, portrait by Chuck Stewart (Photo: Edward Harris)

SOURCE

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CAROLYN BRYANT: KEY WITNESS IN EMMETT TILL’S MURDER TRIAL, GAVE FALSE TESTIMONY, HISTORIAN SAYS

 

 

FILE – In this Aug. 28, 2015 file photo, the grave marker of Emmett Till has a photo of Till and coins placed on it during a gravesite ceremony at the Burr Oak Cemetery marking the 60th anniversary of the murder of Till in Mississippi, in Alsip, Ill. The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till’s alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book. Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The Associated Press on Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017, that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Key Till witness gave false testimony, historian says

HILLEL ITALIE

Associated Press January 28, 2017

NEW YORK (AP) — The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till’s alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book.

Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The Associated Press on Saturday that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008. His book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” comes out next week.

“She told me that ‘Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,'” said Tyson, a Duke University research scholar whose previous books include “Blood Done Sign My Name” and “Radio Free Dixie.”

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman, then known as Carolyn Bryant.

His murder became national news, was a galvanizing event in the civil rights movement and has been the subject of numerous books and movies. During the trial, Bryant said that he had grabbed her, and, in profane terms, bragged about his history with white woman. The jury was not present when she testified.

Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by the all-white jury. Both men, who later told Look magazine they did murder Till, have since died. Milam’s widow, Juanita Milam, would later tell the FBI she believed that Carolyn Bryant had fabricated her story. Juanita Milam died in 2014. The Justice Department re-examined the case a decade ago, but no one was indicted as a murderer or an accomplice.

On Saturday, the maker of a documentary on Till said he had long been sure that Bryant’s story was false.

“His mother had mentioned that Emmett had a speech impediment and that the things Bryant claimed he was saying he could not have said easily,” said Keith Beauchamp, whose “The Untold Story of Emmett Till” came out in 2005.

Tyson said that he spoke with Donham after her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, contacted him. Bryant had read “Blood Done Sign My Name,” about a racist murder during his childhood in Oxford, North Carolina, and invited Tyson to meet with her and Donham.

Tyson said he and Donham had two conversations, both lasting 2-3 hours, and that he planned at the time to place the material in the archives at the University of North Carolina. Asked why he waited so long to publicize his findings, he responded that historians think in different terms than do journalists.

“I’m more interested in what speaks to the ages than in what is the latest media thing,” he said.

He added that he wasn’t sure whether Donham knew about the book. He said he had fallen out of touch with the family and that when he last spoke with Bryant, a few years ago, she said Donham was in poor health.

Till was a fun-loving teenager from Chicago visiting the Mississippi Delta and helping out on his great-uncle Mose Wright’s farm. On Aug. 24, 1955, Till and some other kids drove to a local store, Bryant’s, for refreshments. At Bryant’s, some of the kids stayed on the porch, watching a game of checkers, while the others filed inside to buy bubble gum and sodas. Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old wife of proprietor Roy Bryant, was behind the counter.

Accounts of what happened next differ.

Mrs. Bryant claimed Emmett bragged about dating white women up north. She said he grabbed her and asked her, “How about a date, baby?” Simeon Wright, his cousin, heard none of this. But there is no doubt about what he heard when they left the store, he told the AP in 2005.

Standing on the front porch, Emmett let out a wolf whistle.

Carolyn Donham’s whereabouts have long been a mystery, but North Carolina voter rolls list a Carolyn Holloway Donham. Holloway is her maiden name.

The address is for a green, split-level home in Raleigh at the mouth of a neat cul-de-sac just two turns off a busy four-lane thoroughfare. The well-tended house has burnt-orange shutters and a front-facing brick chimney decorated with a large metal sunburst. Orange flags emblazed with the word “Google” dot the lawn.

A woman, who appeared to be of late middle age, and a small barking dog appeared at the front door. When a reporter asked if this was the Bryant family home, the woman replied, “Yes.”

When asked if Carolyn Donham was at home, the woman replied, “She’s not available.”

At first, she refused to accept a business card, but relented after hearing about the upcoming book.

The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation has shared news reports about the book on Instagram and asked if Donham would have the “decency and courage” to speak with Till’s relatives.

___

AP National Writer Allen Breed contributed to this report from North Carolina

SOURCE

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A White woman who lied and caused the brutal murder of an innocent Black male.

Oh, and the planet Venus is hot.

No surprise.

White women have been lying on Black men and Black boys for centuries.

Racist white supremacist White women through the years have been lying down with Black men and spreading their legs East, West, North, and South and then jumping up and crying rape when White male relatives walked in on the consensual sex.

White women who wanted the black penis because they smoldered in anger at their White male relatives who raped and brutalized defenseless Black women and little 7-, 10-, 13-year-old Black girls.

But, that discussion is for an upcoming post I am working on.

After the trial, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant confessed about the murder and because of double jeopardy could not be retried on Emmett Till’s murder.

As for Juanita Milam , whatever she knew about little Emmett’s lynching, she took that to her grave. I find it hard that those four did not sit around discussing the murder after the farce of a trial ended.

The murder of Emmett took him from the loving arms of his mother, Mrs. Mamie Till.

Mamie Till Mobley collapses when her son Emmett’s body arrives at the old Illinois Central Railroad after his murder by racists in Mississippi. On her left, with the white collar, is Alva Doris Roberts’ husband, Bishop Isaiah L. Roberts, who presided over the funeral. On the right, also dressed in clerical black, is Bishop Louis Henry Ford, who did the youth’s eulogy. An Illinois freeway is named after Bishop Ford. | Sun-Times library

As for Carolyn Bryant, she committed perjury, and according to the state of Mississippi, the statute of limitations on perjury prevents her from being charged with that crime.

She may think her recanting and confessing all these years later will guarantee her a seat in Heaven. No such thing is guaranteed when you have offended the Most High and expect a quick recanting means all is forgiven at the last moment when you are near death. The Creator sees though that hypocrisy just as much as He does any other abomination.

Nazi war criminals into this century can still be brought to justice, but, the racist murdering savage rapists and murderers of so many innocent Black people—they are still allowed to roam the earth.

Carolyn Bryant

She may not be able to be brought to justice for murdering a young and innocent child, but, there is kismet that exists in the universe, and payback is a bitch.

SKYWATCH: CATCH AN IRIDIUM FLARE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE, WATCH AN INFANT STAR GROW, AND MORE

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OBSERVING HIGHLIGHTS

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, January 27 – February 4

Can you see the Winter Hexagon? It now fills the sky toward the east and south after dinnertime. Also, new Moon tonight (exact at 7:07 p.m. EST).

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Get Your Iridium Fix Before It’s Too Late!

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Join Alan Stern in S&T‘s Next Live Webinar!

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COLORLINES: A WOMEN’S MARCH, A BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE

Why I Marched on Washington—With Zero Reservations

Rinku Sen reflects on real feminist organizing and rejects the notion that women of color were just window dressing at the Women’s March on Washington.

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At the massive, historic gathering in D.C. we found expressions of resistance, determination and even joy.

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HATEWATCH: HEADLINES FOR 1-25-2017

January 25, 2017

 

Hatewatch Staff

Fake think tanks fuel fake news; White nationalists inside the Beltway; VDare’s convention plans spoiled; and more.

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Wired: Fake think tanks help fuel fake news – and the president’s tweets.

The New Republic: When the white nationalists came to Washington.

Politico: Far-right activists push Donald Trump to move faster on promised Muslim crackdown.

BuzzFeed: Trump supporters online are pretending to be French in order to manipulate France’s election.

Media Matters: Yosemite venue cancels white nationalist VDare convention booking after it learns of group’s views.

Metro (UK): White nationalist Richard Spencer wants you to stop sharing videos of him being punched, please.

Slate: Texas Supreme Court agrees to consider rolling back same-sex marriage rights.

WLRN (Miami, FL): Hate crimes are on the rise in Florida, led by a big spike in post-election incidents.

Access ADL: Group of Klan members in Union County, Miss., charged with robbing man at local church.

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Malheur Refuge occupation supporter who was arrested with illegal machine gun pleads guilty.

Seattle Times: Shooter in UW protest incident sent a Facebook message to Yiannopoulos before he opened fire.

Star-Tribune (Minneapolis, MN): Officer testifies that he exchanged ‘racially charged’ texts with accused BLM protest shooter.

Gay Star News: North Carolina Republican wants to make it a crime to call ex-governor a bigot.

Chicago Tribune: Plano woman faces hate-crime charges after threatening gay man with baseball-bat assault.

KSHB-TV (Kansas City, MO): Gay couple targeted by hate criminals in their South Kansas City home.

 

GEORGE CARLIN ON DEALING WITH THE 2016 ELECTION, THE HYPOCRISRY OF POLITICIANS, ENEMIES, WAR AND PENISES

Even though he passed on from this world, George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008)  still rules when it comes to telling it like it is.

Here are three videos where he speaks like the very talented, humorous, critically thinking and intelligent man that he was.

The first is an excerpt from George Carlin on Charlie Rose: 3-26-1996.

 

 

 

 

He is right that people in the end get just what they deserve, especially in the 2016 elections of those who not only voted against the lives and value of their fellows citizens, but, also voted against their own best interests.

 

 

Nothing like a pissing contest to start wars and destroy everyone and everything the world over.

Then there are the pro-lifers who don’t give a damn about the living children walking around. Children they would piss and shit on instead working to make life better for these defenseless ones.

Way to go George.

You are missed.

 

 

 

2017: THE YEAR FOR #OSCAR SO BLACK?

The year 2016 has given the viewing public many various films to whet its movie-going appetite.

Up for possible nominations for the 89TH Academy Awards are films about a group of highly skilled mathematical genius women who happen to be Black–Black women who worked during the time of Jane Crow segregation at NASA and through it all, managed to help land a man on the Moon with Apollo 11;  a working class Black sanitation worker who was once a champion in the disbanded Negro Baseball League and the family members who live in his world; a young Polynesian girl who defies all odds to bring help to her people and take them to a new land; a divorced husband who writes a novel that may or not be a veiled threat against his former wife; a film about two men who have been in denial of their homosexuality and how it affects their lives through the years; and a sci-fi film about beings who come to Earth who may or may not have a sinister motive for arriving to our planet.

In 2016 before the Oscars telecasted, on one side, there was the “Why don’t you White Oscar voters nominate films by and starring Blacks!”; on the other side, there were the “Well, ya’ll just don’t make any quality films then we just might nominate them!”

This year is a whole lot different where films are concerned.

Contenders on the list for everyone’s dollars are Manchester By the Sea, Moonlight, Fences, Hidden Figures,  La La Land, Arrival, Moana, Nocturnal Animals, to name just a few.

Photo of Manchester by the Sea still movie poster.

Moonlight poster.

Photo still from Moonlight.

Poster of Fences.

Photo still from Fences.

 

Photo still of Hidden Figures from 20TH Century Fox Studios.

Photo still from Hidden Figures.

Poster of La La Land.

Arrival film poster.

Moana film poster.

Nocturnal Animals film poster.

 

Many of the films I have not seen yet, some I have seen: Hidden Figures, Fences, Moana, Moonlight, Arrival, and Nocturnal Animals.

Wow.

I have not seen that many films in a 6 month and less time period in decades.

Just shows that once in a Harvest Moon, Hollyweird can actually put out some films that can earn my hard earned dollar.

Most notable on this list are many films that address issues that affect the Black community as well as point out those parts of everyone’s life that revolve on a universal note.

Films which bring to light hitherto unknown and unheralded eras in this nation’s history as well as the usual Hollywood fare.

At the top of the list are films which some might consider so-called black films:  Hidden Figures, Moonlight, and Fences.

Hidden Figures tells of the story of the wonderful Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA in the early days of America’s space race and exploration in helping to get astronauts into space, a man on the Moon, and to put the United States ahead in the era of spaceflight. I originally wrote on the West Computer Black women here.

Fences, starring Viola Davis and starring and directed by Oscar winner Denzel Washington, is based on the late and great American playwright August Wilson’s Tony-winning play. The film tells of the life of Troy Maxson and his family, and it took years to bring this play to the silver screen because Mr. Wilson stipulated that if his play Fences was ever given the Hollywood treatment, it must be directed by a Black director.

Then there is Moonlight, a story of two young Black men groping their way through youth, trials and tribulations, adulthood, and coming to terms with their homosexuality.

Unlike last year’s #Oscar So White, when there were no strong contenders nominated that involved Black actors, directors, and producers, 2017 has many great films that will surely test the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hand.

Will Fences take home a sweep of Oscars?

Will Hidden Figures upset all the other nominees?

Will Moonlight be the dark horse in what seems to be an #Oscar So Black year?

Will any of these films even get nominated for any Oscars?

It remains to be seen if this year of 2017 will be just another soooooooo very, very white Oscar night.

 

Oscar. Trademark of AMPAS.

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF COMMEMORATION IN MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST: JANUARY 27, 2017

International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

On January 27 each year, the United Nations (UN) remembers the Holocaust that affected many people of Jewish origin during World War II. This day is called the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. It also commemorates when the Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on January 27, 1945.

January 27 is a special day to remember World War II’s holocaust victims.

©iStockphoto.com/Dan Moore

What Do People Do?

Holocaust survivors and various leaders make their voices heard on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Many of them speak publicly about the Holocaust or their experiences around the event, its aftermath and why the world should never forget what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Many statements emphasize the need for future generations to learn about and remember the Holocaust and for everyone to work towards preventing genocide.

The UN organizes and supports events such as: concerts by musicians who survived the Holocaust or are survivors’ descendants; art exhibitions influenced by the Holocaust; presentations of special stamps; the introduction of special educational programs; and film screening and book signing focused on the Holocaust.

Israel and many countries in Europe and North America mark the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Many academics present discussion papers or hold seminars or round table discussions on the Holocaust and its legacy in the modern world. Schools or colleges may also have special lessons on the Holocaust. The Holocaust and how people commemorate it receive special attention on the Internet, television, radio, print media.

Public Life

The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is a global observance and not a public holiday.

Background

The Holocaust, or Shoah (Sho’ah, Shoa), is the term used to describe the deliberate murder and desecration of millions of people prior to and during World War II in Germany and German occupied areas in Europe. Many of them were Jewish but the Roma people, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, people with disabilities, homosexuals and political and religious opponents were also killed. Many people died in concentration and death camps spread across Nazi-occupied Europe. One of the most notorious camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Oświęcim, Poland. More than one million people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.

On January 24, 2005, the UN General Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Following this session, a UN resolution was drafted to designate January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The resolution called for education programs on the Holocaust to help prevent genocide. It also rejected denials that the Holocaust occurred. On November 1, 2005, the assembly adopted this resolution so the day could be observed each year. It was first observed on January 27, 2006.

Many Jewish groups, particularly in Israel, also observe Yom HaShoah, which is a day of mourning for Holocaust victims on 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which falls in April or May of the Gregorian calendar.

Symbols

The symbol of the “Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme” consists of four elements on a solid black background. Two elements are the words “Remembrance and Beyond” and the UN symbol, both depicted in white. The UN symbol consists of a projection of the globe centered on the North Pole surrounded by two olive branches.

The other two elements are a piece of barbed wire and two white roses. The strands of the barbed wire merge into the stems of the roses. The barbed wire represents: the concentration camps; the loss of freedom of Jewish people and many other groups before and during World War II; and their pain and suffering.

The white roses represent peace, freedom and remembrance. These flowers also remind people of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance movement that was active in Germany from June 1942 until February 1943. In the United States and United Kingdom, white roses symbolize the investigation, remembrance and prevention of genocide.

2017 Theme: “Holocaust Remembrance: Educating for a Better Future”

International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust Observances

 

Weekday	Date	Year	Name	Holiday Type
Wed	Jan 27	2010	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Thu	Jan 27	2011	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Fri	Jan 27	2012	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Sun	Jan 27	2013	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Mon	Jan 27	2014	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Tue	Jan 27	2015	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Wed	Jan 27	2016	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Fri	Jan 27	2017	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Sat	Jan 27	2018	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Sun	Jan 27	2019	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance
Mon	Jan 27	2020	International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust	United Nations observance