E.R. Braithwaite, author whose autobiographical novel dramatising his time as a black teacher in east London in the 50s had a career that took in social work and diplomacy as well as writing
‘I don’t know whether I changed any lives or not’ … ER Braithwaite. Photograph: Frank Martin for the Guardian
ER Braithwaite, the Guyanese author of To Sir, With Love, has died at his home in Maryland at the age of 104.
Born in Guyana on 27 June 1912, Eustace Edward Ricardo Braithwaite was the child of privileged parents, both graduates of Oxford University. His father was a diamond miner while his mother raised the family. During the second world war, he joined the Royal Air Force to fight as a pilot before going on to Cambridge to read physics. He later said that he experienced no racial prejudice within the RAF.
On graduating, he found himself barred from work as an engineer because of racism. Unable to find an alternative, he took a job as a teacher at St George-in-the-East school in London’s East End, which was recovering from the battering it had taken during the war. This experience formed the basis of his autobiographical novel To Sir With Love, his 1959 book later adapted into a film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier.
At the school, renamed Greenslade School in the film, the well-educated middle class graduate was confronted with casual racism, violence and antisocial behaviour by a group of disadvantaged pupils. Hardest to bear was the self-hatred the racism brought out in him and the low expectations of colleagues for their charges.
Gritty and unsentimental, the book shows Braithwaite gradually turning his class around through a mix of affection and respect. It also revealed his love affair with a fellow teacher – controversial at the time because the other teacher was white. When the film adaptation was made in 1967, Braithwaite criticised it, saying the love affair had been downplayed.
The book also contrasted his experience of race relations in Britain with those in the US, where he studied before joining the RAF. He wrote: “The rest of the world in general and Britain in particular are prone to point an angrily critical finger at American intolerance, forgetting that in its short history as a nation it has granted to its Negro citizens more opportunities for advancement and betterment, per capita, than any other nation in the world with an indigent Negro population.”
To Sir, With Love has been hailed as a seminal work for immigrants from the colonies to postwar Britain. In an introduction, Caryl Phillips wrote: “The author is keen for us to understand that the Ricky Braithwaites of this world cannot, by themselves, uproot prejudice, but they can point to its existence. And this, after all, is the beginning of change; one must first identity the location of the problem before one can set about addressing it.”
After teaching, Braithwaite moved to social work, finding foster homes for children of colour. This formed the basis of for his 1962 book Paid Servant: A Report About Welfare Work in London. He went on to write a further nine books, a mix of novels, short-story collections and memoir.
A visit to apartheid South Africa in 1973, following the country lifting its ban on To Sir, With Love, resulted in Honorary White (1975). The title was a reference to his visa status, which granted significantly more privileges than enjoyed by the native black population. The book had a mixed reception: one critic described it as too soft on the apartheid regime, too hard on the oppressed black population and too focused on the author.
After his social work, he moved to Paris to work for the World Veterans Association, before transferring to Unesco and a diplomatic career that took in posts as permanent representative of Guyana to the UN and Guyana’s ambassador to Venezuela.
From diplomacy, he moved into academia, teaching at the universities of New York, Florida State and Howard in Washington, where he also served as writer-in-residence.
When asked in 2013 whether he had stayed in touch with students from the London school, he admitted he had not, telling the Coffee Table blog: “I don’t know if I changed any lives or not, but something did happen between them and me, which was quite gratifying.”
Braithwaite’s companion, Genevieve Ast, confirmed his death on Tuesday. He died a day after being admitted to a medical centre in Rockville, Maryland.
Alan Thicke at the 42nd annual Daytime Emmy Awards in Burbank, Calif., in 2015.Credit Richard Shotwell/Associated Press
Alan Thicke, the Canadian actor, singer and songwriter best remembered for his portrayal of the ultimate suburban middlebrow dispenser of parental advice on the sitcom “Growing Pains,” died on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 69.
Mr. Thicke was playing hockey with his 19-year-old son, Carter, when he had a heart attack, his ex-wife Gloria Loring said. She added, “He died the way any good Canadian should — playing hockey with his son.”
Mr. Thicke projected a genial warmth across all his television work, most memorably on “Growing Pains,” which ran from 1985 to 1992 on ABC. His character, Dr. Jason Seaver, a psychiatrist, was a classic 1980s formulation of the reassuring father who solved everyone’s problems with a warm homily by the end of each 30-minute episode. The cast also included Joanna Kerns as his wife and Kirk Cameron as his oldest child.
The cast of “Growing Pains” in 1985. From left, Kirk Cameron, Alan Thicke, Jeremy Miller, Joanna Kerns and Tracey Gold.Credit ABC Photo Archives, via Getty Images
The role earned Mr. Thicke the nickname America’s Dad. His character was ranked No. 37 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time.”
Mr. Thicke’s talents also included songwriting. He wrote the theme songs for numerous game shows, including “The Joker’s Wild,” “Celebrity Sweepstakes” and the original “Wheel of Fortune,” and he wrote the themes for the sitcoms “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life” with Al Burton and Ms. Loring.
The “Diff’rent Strokes” theme is a masterpiece of the genre, setting up in less than a minute the story of a white multimillionaire who took in (and later adopted) two black children. It begins:
Now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum, What might be right for you, may not be right for some. A man is born, he’s a man of means. Then along come two, they got nothing but their jeans. But they got Diff’rent strokes.
His career also included stints as a talk-show host, both real and fictional. His syndicated late-night show “Thicke of the Night” was seen in the 1983-84 season, and he played the talk-show host Rich Ginger on the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” He also played himself on several episodes of the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”
He was a writer on the satirical talk show “Fernwood Tonight” (1977), a spinoff of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” that starred Martin Mull and Fred Willard, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for his writing on a later version of the show, “America 2-Night.”
He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1988 for best performance by an actor in a comedy or musical series for “Growing Pains,” and for a Daytime Emmy in 1998 for his work as host of the game show “Pictionary.”
Mr. Thicke self-deprecatingly called himself “the affordable Shatner,” a reference to his appearances at public events that were said to have been turned down by his fellow Canadian actor William Shatner, of “Star Trek” fame. He was a host of the annual Disney Christmas Parade with Joan Lunden in the 1980s, and of the Miss Universe pageant and the Canadian Comedy Awards.
Mr. Thicke was born Alan Willis Jeffrey on March 1, 1947, in Kirkland Lake, Ontario.
“We started in northern Ontario in a small town where I didn’t even see a television set until I was 7 years old,” Mr. Thicke said at the unveiling of his star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2013, the website ET Canada reported. “So when you take that moment and fast-forward to what I’m experiencing today with my family here and feeling embraced by my country — that’s unique.”
In addition to his son Carter, Mr. Thicke is survived by two other sons, Robin, the singer and songwriter, and Brennan; and his wife, Tanya Callau. Two previous marriages ended in divorce.
Hours before his death, Mr. Thicke commented on Twitter about “Fuller House,” the Netflix follow-up to the television series “Full House,” on which he had recently appeared as a guest star.
“Season 2 Fuller House looking good,” he wrote. “I even like the ones I’m not in!”
Irma Thomas (born February 18, 1941, Pontchatoula, Louisiana) is an American singer from New Orleans. She is known as the “Soul Queen of New Orleans”.
Ms. Thomas is a contemporary of Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and Etta James, but she has never experienced the level of commercial success those ladies received. In 2007, she won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for After the Rain, her first Grammy in a career spanning over 50 years. She has had a career singing with the likes of James Taylor (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight”, “Never Die Young”).
In April 2007, Ms. Thomas was honored for her contributions to Louisiana music with induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. Also in 2007, Ms. Thomas accepted an invitation to participate in Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino where, singing with Marcia Ball, she contributed “I Just Can’t Get New Orleans Off My Mind”.
But, Ms. Thomas has been busy all these years, appearing at concerts in performing twice at the Bluesfest music festival in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia in 201. On April 24 of that year, she performed on the Crossroads stage, coming on after Mavis Staples of the famous family singing group, The Staples Singers; then on April 25, she headlined the Crossroads stage, coming on after Jethro Tull and Osibisa.
In 2013, Ms. Thomas was nominated for a Blues Music Award in the “Soul Blues Female Artist” category, which she rightfully won. She won the same award in 2014.
Here is a real beaut from a beautiful lady who puts such heart and soul in her lovely singing of the wonderful song “Anyone (Who Knows What Love Is)”.
The song was featured in December 2011 in Charlie Booker’s anthology series Black Mirror, in the second episode, entitled Fifteen Million Merits. The song was also featured in a karaoke segment in the seventh episode, White Christmas, in December 2014, and again in the third series episode Men Against Fire in 2016.
Obviously a very popular song.
And now the incomparable Ms. Irma Thomas who sings “Anyone (Who Knows What Love Is”).
New results from NASA’s Dawn orbiter show that the largest asteroid (and acknowledged dwarf planet) must possess a global layer of water ice that lies just below its dark, dusty surface.
A Hubble image of a nearby, massive elliptical galaxy (NGC 4696) reveals tenuous filaments that appear to be connected to the growth of the galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
An incredible blaze of light discovered more than a year ago still has astronomers baffled as to its cause. The answer (supernova or black-hole-shredded star) may be contrary to recent headlines.
Have you ever tried to see a Siriusrise? If you can find a spot with a good view down to the east-southeast horizon, watch for Sirius to come up about two fists at arm’s length below Orion’s Belt.
Colorful lights twinkle everywhere during the holiday season, including up above in some remarkably tinted double stars. Find out what makes them so alluring.
This is the fourth update in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s effort to collect reports of bias-related harassment and intimidation around the country following the election. This update spans the period from November 9 to December 12.
Dylann Storm Roof, indoctrinated in online hate and racism, was convicted today in Charleston, S.C., of a murderous gun rampage in 2015 that left nine people dead at a historic African-American church. The racially motivated killing spree jarred the nation.
DYLANN ROOF FOUND GUILTY IN CHARLESTON CHURCH MASSACRE
Dylann S. Roof being led into the courthouse in Shelby, N.C., on June 18, 2015.Credit Jason Miczek/Reuters
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Dylann S. Roof, a self-radicalized young white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners last year when he opened fire during a long-planned assault on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was found guilty by a federal jury here on Thursday.
The jury convicted Mr. Roof of nine counts of hate crimes resulting in death, three counts of hate crimes involving an attempt to kill (there were three survivors), nine counts of obstructing the exercise of religion resulting in death, three counts of that charge with an attempt to kill, and nine counts of using a firearm to commit murder during a crime of violence.
Mr. Roof, 22, stood, his hands at his side and his face emotionless, as a clerk read the verdict aloud in court. Two deputy United States marshals stood behind Mr. Roof, whose lawyers also stood nearby.
He will face the same jurors next month when they gather on Jan. 3 to begin a second and more suspenseful phase of his trial to decide whether he will be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.
As the first verdicts were read, a few women in the courtroom nodded with satisfaction. But as the clerk read the counts, a process that took about 12 minutes, the women eventually drew still. After the court adjourned, the two adult survivors of the attack, Felicia Sanders and Polly Sheppard, shared a long embrace.
Reaction was swift. “It is my hope that the survivors, the families and the people of South Carolina can find some peace in the fact that justice has been served,” Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina said in a statement.
The jury reached its verdict hours after hearing closing arguments in the case. The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion from the first minutes of the trial, which began on Dec. 7 and included a swift acknowledgment from the chief defense lawyer, David I. Bruck, that Mr. Roof was responsible for the “astonishing, horrible attack” on June 17, 2015.
Indeed, Mr. Roof had chillingly confessed to investigators nearly 18 months earlier and revealed his purpose in a blatantly racist manifesto that he published online. His choice of targets seemed intensely premeditated — he scouted the church half a dozen times — although he also researched other black churches and a festival elsewhere in South Carolina before settling on Charleston because, he wrote, it is the “most historic city in my state.”
In his closing statement to the jury that lasted 53 minutes, an assistant United States attorney, Nathan S. Williams, depicted Mr. Roof as “a man of hatred, a man who’s proven to be a coward and a man of immense racial ignorance.” Repeatedly using the word “hatred” to connect Mr. Roof to the hate-crime counts, Mr. Williams said the defendant had “executed them because he believes that they are nothing more than animals.”
The prosecutor’s voice often rose in outrage, and the jurors were again shown photographs of the carnage Mr. Roof left behind. “He must be held accountable for each and every action he took in that church,” Mr. Williams urged.
As he has throughout the trial, Mr. Bruck responded by planting suggestions that Mr. Roof was mentally unstable, and thus not fully accountable. He peppered his closing statement with words like “abnormal,” “irrationality,” “senselessness,” “illogical,” “obsessive,” “delusional,” and “suicidal.” Mr. Roof told the F.B.I. in a confession shortly after being arrested that he had saved ammunition to kill himself if, as he expected, he confronted the police when he left the church.
Such an argument would ordinarily be advanced during the trial’s penalty phase, but Mr. Roof said again on Thursday that he intends to represent himself at that point, presumably because he hopes to avoid courtroom disclosures about his family and psychological background. Although Mr. Roof may change his mind, Thursday’s closing argument may well have been Mr. Bruck’s last opportunity to plant the defense’s theory.
He referred to Mr. Roof as “lost.” He said “there is something wrong with his perception” and urged the jury to “to understand what was going on in his head.”
The judge, Richard M. Gergel of United States District Court, consistently refused to allow the defense to introduce what it described as “evidence of the defendant’s state of mind and personal characteristics.” Thursday was no different. When Mr. Bruck ventured too close to discussion of Mr. Roof’s mental health during his closing statement, prosecutors interrupted with objections, and Judge Gergel quickly and forcefully announced: “Sustained.”
Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed on the basic contours of Mr. Roof’s gravitation toward racial animosity. He belonged to no groups and acted alone in Charleston, and they said he had been an avid consumer of racist materials online.
“You can easily give him way too much credit for thinking of this stuff if you don’t see where it came from,” Mr. Bruck said of Mr. Roof, who had declared in his writings that he had not been “raised in a racist home or environment.”
The Wednesday night attack at the oldest A.M.E. congregation in the South began less than an hour after Mr. Roof unexpectedly entered through an unlocked side door and took a seat at a weekly Bible study meeting. The congregants, including the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, were studying the parable of the sower.
The session was passing without incident — one victim, Tywanza Sanders, even recorded a few moments on his cellphone and posted the video to Snapchat — but when the congregants closed their eyes for a familiar benediction, the staccato report of gunfire echoed through the ground-floor fellowship hall.
When the congregants looked up, they saw Mr. Roof holding a Glock .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol he had bought about two months earlier and concealed in a pack on his waist. Mr. Pinckney was wounded, and the churchgoers were diving below the room’s circular tables. Mr. Roof kept firing, emptying magazine after magazine, and striking the victims at least 60 times. One crime scene photo showed one of the tables bearing an opened Bible, a folded study sheet and an empty magazine.
It was one of the most unfathomable racial attacks in decades, and it upended the notion of a post-racial America that some had imagined after the election of the country’s first black president. But fears of street violence eased when family members of five victims appeared at Mr. Roof’s bond hearing less than 48 hours after the killings and expressed forgiveness for the accused. President Obama flew to Charleston for Mr. Pinckney’s memorial service and delivered a eulogy in the form of an indignant and sorrowful meditation on race.
This elegant port city where half of all slaves disembarked and the Civil War began soon assumed a mantle of racial healing, although some in the community found the good feelings a superficial papering over of inequities in education, law enforcement and poverty. And the wounds were reopened this month when a state court jury deadlocked in the case of Michael T. Slager, the former North Charleston police officer accused of murder for shooting an unarmed black motorist.
The victims of the attack at Mother Emanuel, as the church is known, were Mr. Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; Susie Jackson; Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Mr. Sanders; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr.; the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; and Myra Thompson.
The three survivors were Ms. Sanders, Ms. Sheppard and Ms. Sanders’s granddaughter, a minor identified in the indictment only as K.M. During turns on the witness stand that started and finished the testimony for the prosecution, Ms. Sanders and Ms. Sheppard identified Mr. Roof as the gunman and described the havoc that turned a house of worship into the blood-soaked scene of yet another mass killing.
The Dylann Roof Trial: The Evidence
Prosecutors and defense lawyers are introducing scores of exhibits in the federal trial of Dylann S. Roof, the self-avowed white supremacist who is accused of killing nine black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although the judge has forbidden the release of some exhibits, such as certain crime scene photographs, he has allowed many to be made public beyond the courtroom.
Eight of the victims died at the church, cut down by the hollow-point rounds that Mr. Roof had brought with him from his home in the Columbia area, about two hours away.
Ms. Sheppard, the government’s final witness, told jurors that Mr. Roof had approached her and asked whether she was wounded. She was not.
“I’m going to leave you to tell the story,” Mr. Roof replied, according to Ms. Sheppard.
He soon fled the church on Henrietta Street, driving into the night, in “absolute awe,” he said later, that he had not been confronted by police officers responding to the scene. As Mr. Roof absconded toward North Carolina, the authorities at the church confronted a gruesome scene and bodies shredded by bullets. Mr. Roof was arrested the next morning in Shelby, N.C., where F.B.I. agents questioned him for about two hours and began to piece together his path to racist radicalization and how, over the course of six months, he planned the assault on Emanuel.
But before Mr. Roof spoke of his beliefs, which he had detailed in a handwritten journal and an online manifesto, he admitted to the attack. “I did it,” Mr. Roof said in the F.B.I. interview, which was played in its entirety during the third of six days of testimony.
The confession was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case, which was bolstered by the accounts of Ms. Sanders and Ms. Sheppard that moved courtroom observers to tears. Prosecutors also produced an array of technical evidence, such as phone records and GPS data, to demonstrate Mr. Roof’s premeditation and to document his views on race.
He wrote that he mounted the attack in Charleston because no one else would take a stand against what he perceived as an epidemic of black-on-white crime and the relegation of white Americans to second-class status. He called himself a white nationalist, as well as a white supremacist, and said he subscribed to ideologies advanced by Klansmen and Nazis. He wrote of his disdain for black and Jewish people, among others.
Mr. Roof proudly wore a jacket bearing patches of the apartheid-era flags of South Africa and Rhodesia, and posed in photographs with the Confederate battle flag. In a consequence that he surely did not anticipate, that flag was removed from the grounds of the South Carolina State House in response to the church killings, taken down by a Republican governor and state Legislature after decades of resistance.
Mr. Roof’s court-appointed lawyers called no witnesses during the guilt phase of the trial, and it is unclear whether the jury will ever consider their theory that Mr. Roof’s behavior derived from mental illness.
The decision to try Mr. Roof was a subject of some dispute. Through his lawyers, he had offered to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison. Ms. Sanders and Ms. Sheppard both supported such an agreement, as did many family members of the victims.
But the Justice Department chose to seek the death penalty, in part, prosecutors said in a court filing, because of Mr. Roof “expressed hatred and contempt toward African-Americans, as well as other groups.”
The following New York Times arcticle addresses the collecting of racist memorabilia, those who collect these items , how they come to terms with the history behind each object, and the lessons learned in understanding the demeaning racist stereotypes and lies that these objects created through the years, the effects of which are still with us in 21ST Century United States.
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Confronting Racist Objects
By Logan Jaffe
Dec. 9, 2016
Millions of racist objects sit in the homes of everyday Americans. We asked for your experiences with these objects and received hundreds of responses. Some of you told us about your family heirlooms. Some described antique finds, and many of you simply wanted to know what should be done with racist objects. What is their place today, when racial tensions and racial attacks are on the rise? Here are some of your stories about reconciling, reclaiming and reinterpreting racist objects.
THE COLLECTOR: “We are not that.”
Harriet Michel’s Harlem brownstone is full of objects that depict African-Americans as subhuman caricatures. “We as a family and we as a people have moved so far beyond that,” she said. “But it’s still a reminder of how we were seen and depicted and not to forget that lesson.”
One of the first pieces she collected was a lawn ornament of a black child sitting on a stump, fishing. She named it Rastus and reclaimed it as “the guardian angel” of her house. Her children explore their own complicated bond with Rastus in the video above.
But an identical object also sits in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich. David Pilgrim, the founder and director, prefers to call racist lawn ornaments like Rastus “lawn warts” that have historically indicated and marked “white” spaces, whether that was the owner’s intent or not. He said that the Michels’ reclamation of the statue effectively “takes a piece that was meant to be harmful and takes the harm out of it.”
Readers share stories about their own collections:
Femi Folami, 62, Miami, African-American
“I began purchasing racist iconography and objects at age 16, and created a mission for myself that I called ‘Liberating Jemima.’ My mother supported two children after my dad died by being a maid in the homes of others. I felt that by buying mammy items [like the one photographed here] and giving them an honored place in my home, that I was indeed liberating them from the clutches of their ‘owners’ (usually white people) and bringing them home to rest in a household that would hold them in high esteem.”
Jane Sprague, 46, Long Beach, N.Y., White
“My father has for years proudly displayed a small statue that depicts a racist exaggeration of an African-American man holding a lantern on the side porch of my parents’ farmhouse in upstate New York. My father is a virulent racist, and his racism disfigured my own perceptions of race growing up. When he passes, we’ll either melt down that statue [displayed here in a photograph by my mother] or bury it with him.”
Dr. Wilfredo Lukban, 51, Fountainville, Pa., Chinese-Filipino
“I am a 51-year-old Asian-American male who happens to be a physician, and married to my husband. About a year ago in an antique shop near the Delaware shore, I found sheet music from 1950 that depicts a young Asian man, presumably Chinese, carrying a mustached presumably Western man in hunting garb who is riding the rickshaw and enjoying a cigar while fanning himself with a paper fan. So I said to my husband, ‘I am going to buy this! It is just so deliciously racist, I love it framed!’”
THE ACTIVIST: “They think we’re just historical.”
Racist objects are not a thing of the past, and they are not limited to depictions of African-Americans. Robert Roche, an American Indian of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, has fought for decades to change the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo mascot, which appears on the baseball team’s uniforms, and promotional items of all kinds. As Mr. Roche argues in the video above, the logo not only insults and mocks his race and spirituality, but also perpetuates the narrative that American Indians are no longer an active, living part of society, but are ignorant, savage characters assigned to the past. He’s seen it firsthand when speaking to classrooms: “Children see this cartoon character and they think we’re not even here anymore,” Mr. Roche said.
David Pilgrim at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia notes that American Indians, Mexican-Americans, Jews, women and poor whites have all been portrayed in racist objects, and the Cleveland Indians’ logo shows that racist objects continue to be manufactured, like bumper stickers that depict President Obama as a monkey and T-shirts with derogatory images of Mexicans in support of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vow to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. “If there’s a race-based incident, there will be imagery created surrounding it, but there will also be objects created for the imagery,” Dr. Pilgrim said.
Here are a few readers’ experiences with contemporary racist objects:
Deborah Chantson, 34, Torrance, Calif., South African-Chinese-Canadian
“When I was living in Burlington, Ontario, in 2012, I was shopping and came across a sushi set that horrified me. In the checkout line, I noticed a Caucasian man was about to buy it. I asked him not to. He asked, ‘Why? It’s not cute and funny?’ I personally spoke to the president of the chain of stores selling this item [captured here in a photo from the company, which says it is no longer for sale], and my friend spoke to the president of the company manufacturing the item, neither of whom could see the offense in it.”
Eli Rosenblatt, 32, Washington, Jewish American
“When I was studying abroad in Poland in 2004, I encountered numerous ‘Zydki’ figurines – small statues and trinkets that depict Jews, often with coins or diamonds in their hands. I bought this one in Krakow to show my family and friends back home. Some years later, my 2-year-old daughter broke it by separating the head from its body. I keep it, maybe, as a certain kind of security I feel as a Jewish person in the U.S. If I was ever a victim of anti-Semitic attitudes or if my own personal pain was attached to the object, I would have gotten rid of it.”
Mariana Vaca, 23, San Diego, Mexican-American
“Memín Pinguín was one of my favorite toys as a kid. He was black, plastic, wore a red baseball cap and always had his pants down, ready to have an inflammable stick inserted so he would look like he was pooping. He was one of the first toys I always wanted to buy whenever I went to visit my family in Guadalajara, Mexico, since I couldn’t get him in the U.S. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to feel differently. I have kept this object and have in fact purchased more for my friends. I think it’s important to see how a seemingly harmless toy can affect the way we see people who are not like us.”
THE SELLER: “It’s weird to me, but it sells.”
Caitlin Sevier, 22, manages her parents’ auction house in Waxahachie, Tex. The family buys hundreds of antiques every week from estate sales and other antique markets, and sells them in a live auction every other Thursday. Ms. Sevier wrote to us to say she constantly finds racist objects when sorting through the lots. At first, finding this stuff was shocking, she said; now she’s deeply conflicted about whether her family should be reselling it. “I tell everyone to do their own thinking,” said Dr. Pilgrim, of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. “But, you know, I wish more people – in respectful, civil ways – would challenge not just the presence of these pieces but what the pieces represent, and ask the question of their neighbors: Why?”
Here are some of your decisions about what to do with such objects:
Eddie Chambers, 56, Austin, Tex., Black
“I’m an artist and a professor in art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. I keep this paper fan in my office, face side down, as that features a grotesque caricature of a black man, for a restaurant called Piccaninny. I feel sick when I look at it. I’ve never shown it to my students. There’s a risk of re-brutalizing the people on whom these artifacts are based. I don’t think we’re fully equipped as a society to rehabilitate some of these things. I’d advise someone who feels conflicted about having these things to destroy it. Get rid of it. Or put it in a box and put it in the garage never to be seen again.”
Irene Hoffman, 52, Santa Barbara, Calif., White
“I have this two-piece citrus squeezer in the shape of a Chinaman. It was given to me by my grandmother-in-law, a warm, open person with a working-class East End British accent and a kind heart, with tendencies to refer to people who looked different to what she considered the British norm as ‘foreigners’ and ‘those people,’ etc. I have kept this object as a memory of her, but I hide it in a cupboard, because I don’t want to offend my downstairs neighbor, who was born in China and is a recent immigrant to the U.S.A.”
Lauren Downing Peters, 29, Brooklyn, White
“This vaudeville-era poster of a man in blackface hung in my parents’ living room. We never thought of it as racist – the man in blackface was my grandfather. My parents recently moved out of their house, and it was only when I presented the idea of hanging the poster in our own home to my husband that he looked at me in horror and said we could never do that. I’m ashamed I’ve been so willing to dissociate the family history in this object from the history of racism. Part of me was sad and conflicted about it never seeing the light of day again, but I’ve decided to donate it to the Jim Crow Museum where it can be contextualized, and people can learn from it.”
Continuing the Conversation
Do you have questions about racist objects? We will be hosting a live chat next week with Dr. Pilgrim and some of our contributors. Bookmark this page to join us.
John Glenn, a freckle-faced son of Ohio who was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth, then became a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate, died on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.
Ohio State University announced his death. Mr. Glenn had recently been hospitalized at the university at the James Cancer Center, though Ohio State officials said at the time that admission there did not necessarily mean he had cancer. He had heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014 and a stroke around that time.
He had kept an office at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which he helped found, and also had a home in Columbus.
In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country’s imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh.
To the America of the 1960s, Mr. Glenn was a clean-cut, good-natured, well-grounded Midwesterner, raised in Presbyterian rectitude, nurtured in patriotism and tested in war, who stepped forward to risk the unknown and succeeded spectacularly, lifting his country’s morale and restoring its self-confidence.
It was an anxious nation that watched and listened that February morning, as Mr. Glenn, 40 years old, a Marine Corps test pilot and one of the seven original American astronauts, climbed into Friendship 7, the tiny Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket rising from the concrete flats of Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The Cold War had long stoked fears of nuclear destruction, and the Russians seemed to be winning the contest with their unsettling ascent into outer space. Two Russians, Yuri A. Gagarin and Gherman S. Titov, had already orbited Earth the year before, overshadowing the feats of two Americans, Alan B. Shepard and Virgil I. Grissom, who had been launched only to the fringes of space.
What, people asked with rising urgency, had happened to the United States’ vaunted technology and can-do spirit?
The answer came at 9:47 a.m. Eastern time, when after weeks of delays the rocket achieved liftoff. It was a short flight, just three orbits. But when Mr. Glenn was safely back, flashing the world a triumphant grin, doubts were replaced by a broad, new faith that the United States could indeed hold its own against the Soviet Union in the Cold War and might someday prevail.
No flier since Lindbergh had received such a cheering welcome. Bands played. People cried with relief and joy. Mr. Glenn was invited to the White House by President John F. Kennedy and paraded up Broadway and across the land. A joint meeting of Congress stood and applauded vigorously as Mr. Glenn spoke at the Capitol.
In his political history of the space age, “…The Heavens and the Earth,” the author Walter A. McDougall described Mr. Glenn’s space mission as a “national catharsis unparalleled.”
“It seemed that he had given Americans back their self-respect,” Mr. McDougall added, “and more than that — it seemed Americans dared again to hope.”
Mr. Glenn was reluctant to talk about himself as a hero. “I figure I’m the same person who grew up in New Concord, Ohio, and went off through the years to participate in a lot of events of importance,” he said in an interview years later. “What got a lot of attention, I think, was the tenuous times we thought we were living in back in the Cold War. I don’t think it was about me. All this would have happened to anyone who happened to be selected for that flight.”
Mr. Glenn did not return to space for a long time. Kennedy thought him too valuable as a hero to risk losing in an accident. So Mr. Glenn resigned from the astronaut corps in 1964, became an executive in private industry and entered politics, serving four full terms as a Democratic senator from Ohio and in 1984 running unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination.
John Glenn with the Friendship 7 in 1962. He was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth.Credit NASA
Finally, 36 years after his Mercury flight, in the last months of his final Senate term, he got his wish for a return to orbit. Despite some criticism that his presence on the mission was a political payoff, a waste of money and of doubtful scientific merit, the hero of yesteryear brought out the crowds again, cheering out of nostalgia and enduring respect as he was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Oct. 29, 1998. At 77, he became the oldest person to go into space.
In retirement from the Senate, Mr. Glenn lived with his wife of 73 years, Anna (he always called her Annie), in a suburb of Washington in addition to Columbus. Ohio State University is the repository of papers from his space and political careers.
“John always had the right stuff,” President Obama said in a statement on Thursday, “inspiring generations of scientists, engineers and astronauts who will take us to Mars and beyond — not just to visit, but to stay.”
The Making of a Hero
John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, the only son of a railroad conductor who also owned a plumbing business, and the former Clara Sproat. A few years later, the Glenns moved to New Concord, a small town in southeastern Ohio with a population of little more than 1,000.
“It was small but had a lot of patriotic feeling and parades on all the national holidays,” Mr. Glenn once said. “Wanting to do something for the country was just natural, growing up in a place like New Concord.”
Like most everyone else there, the Glenns lived through the hard times of the Depression, instilling in their son a rigid moral code based on their own God-fearing example and saw him through an apple-pie boyhood. He played trumpet, sang in the church choir, washed cars for pocket money and worked as a lifeguard. In high school (now named for him), he was an honor student and lettered in football, basketball and tennis.
He still had time to court his high school sweetheart, Anna Margaret Castor, the doctor’s daughter. It did not matter that she stammered; she was his girl, and he loved her. They married in April 1943, and he often called her “the real rock of the family.” From the time they came to public attention, and throughout the turbulence of spaceflight and politics, John and Anna Glenn each seemed the other’s center of gravity.
Not until much later did she undergo intensive therapy that virtually cured her stammer, enabling her even to give speeches in public.
Mr. Glenn with President John F. Kennedy and General Leighton I. Davis during a parade in Cocoa Beach, Fla., after his spaceflight. No flier since Charles Lindbergh had received such a cheering welcome.Credit NASA
Mr. Glenn is survived by his wife; two children, Carolyn Ann Glenn of St. Paul and John David Glenn of Berkeley, Calif.; and two grandsons, Daniel and Zach Glenn.
Mr. Glenn began his journey to fame in World War II. In 1939, he enrolled at Muskingum College in his hometown to study chemistry, but he took flying lessons on the side. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he signed up for the Naval Aviation cadet program and after pilot training opted to join the Marines. As a fighter pilot, he flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and other decorations.
Mr. Glenn saw more action in the Korean War, flying 90 combat missions and winning more medals. He put his life on the line again as a military test pilot in the early days of supersonic flight. In 1957, just months before the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik satellite, he made the first transcontinental supersonic flight, piloting an F8U-1 Crusader from Los Angeles to New York in record time: 3 hours 23 minutes 8.4 seconds.
Then, in 1959, newly promoted to lieutenant colonel, he heeded a call for test pilots to apply to be astronauts for the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He and six other pilots were selected in April of that year. (The original Mercury 7 included Mr. Glenn, Mr. Shepard, Mr. Grissom, Walter Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Deke Slayton and M. Scott Carpenter. Mr. Glenn was the last surviving one.)
All seven men were eager, competitive and ambitious, but none more so than Mr. Glenn. Tom Miller, a retired Marine general and close friend since they were rookie pilots in World War II, recalled that Mr. Glenn was so determined to be an astronaut that he applied weight to his head to compress his height down to the 5-foot-11-inch maximum for the first astronauts. “He wasn’t going to miss a trick,” Mr. Miller said. “He’d be sitting down reading with a big bunch of books sitting on his head.”
But his determination did not win him the assignment to be the first American astronaut to fly. He had to wait out the suborbital flights by Mr. Shepard and Mr. Grissom in 1961 before his turn came.
Patience, Then Liftoff
In his 1999 memoir, written with Nick Taylor, he admitted he was sorely disappointed when Mr. Shepard was tapped for the first flight. As the oldest and most articulate of the astronauts, Mr. Glenn had attracted a big share of the publicity. He said that he had “worked and studied hard dedicating myself to the program” and that he thought he had a “good shot” at being first. In a letter to a NASA official, Mr. Glenn wrote, “I thought I might have been penalized for speaking out for what I thought was the good of the program.”
At this time, as Mr. Glenn often recalled, he never anticipated that his orbital flight would be the one that most excited the public, satisfying the nation’s hunger for a hero.
News Clips: CultureBy STEPHEN FARRELL, SUSAN ARCHER and JOSEPHINE SEDGWICKPlay Video1:08John Glenn, Space and Hollywood
John Glenn, Space and Hollywood
John Noble Wilford, the Times science reporter who covered NASA’s space missions in the 1960s, talks about John Glenn and Hollywood’s depictions of astronauts.
By STEPHEN FARRELL, SUSAN ARCHER and JOSEPHINE SEDGWICK on Publish Date December 9, 2016. . Watch in Times Video »
Tom Wolfe wrote of that time in the best-selling 1979 book “The Right Stuff,” a phrase for coolness in the face of danger that has passed into the idiom. He described Mr. Glenn as excessively pious, scolding his fellow astronauts about their after-hours escapades while openly lobbying to be the first of them to fly.
“He looked like a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw,” Mr. Wolfe wrote. “He had a snub nose, light-hazel eyes, reddish-blond hair and a terrific smile.”
Mr. Glenn said he liked the book but not the 1983 movie based on it, in which he was portrayed by Ed Harris. “Most of his account was reasonably factual, although I was neither the pious saint nor the other guys the hellions he made them into,” he told Life magazine in 1998. “Hollywood made a charade out of the story and caricatures out of the people in it.”
After weeks of delays, Mr. Glenn climbed into Friendship 7 on Feb. 20, 1962, and at 9:47 a.m. Eastern time, the rocket achieved liftoff.Credit NASA
The 1962 space mission came after two months of one postponement after another, sometimes for mechanical problems, often for bad weather. Once Mr. Glenn had to wait six hours, fully suited, in the cramped Friendship 7 capsule before officials called off the launch. But he projected confidence. “You fear the least what you know the most about,” he said.
On the 11th scheduled time, all was “go,” and the rocket lifted off from Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral. “Godspeed, John Glenn,” his fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter said through a microphone at mission control.
The flight stopped the nation in its tracks; people watched on black-and-white television, listened on the radio and prayed.
At the end of the first orbit, an automatic control mechanism failed, and Mr. Glenn took over manual control. He would see three sunsets in a brief time. He puzzled for a while about “fireflies” outside his window. NASA later determined that it was his urine and sweat, which was being dumped overboard and turned to frozen crystals glowing in sunlight.
A faulty warning light signaled that the capsule heat shield, designed to protect it in the fiery descent back to Earth, had come loose and might come off during re-entry. The signal was erroneous, but no one could be sure. Ground controllers ordered that a retrorocket unit attached under the heat shield by metal straps not be jettisoned after firing in order to give added protection and reduce the risk of premature detachment of the heat shield. This was Mr. Glenn’s first real clue that something was amiss.
As Friendship 7 plunged through the atmosphere, the astronaut’s recorded heartbeat raced as one of the metal straps came loose and banged on the side of the capsule.
“Right away, I could see flaming chunks flying by the window, and I thought the heat shield might be falling apart,” he wrote after the flight. “This was a bad moment. But I knew that if that was really happening, it would all be over shortly, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
The capsule splashed down in the Atlantic off the Bahamas, where a Navy destroyer was waiting. Mr. Glenn radioed, “My condition is good, but that was a real fireball, boy.”
In the flush of fame, Mr. Glenn toured the country publicizing the space program, visiting aerospace plants and waving to cheering crowds and signing autographs. But he always had his eye on another flight into space.
He kept asking NASA officials about a new flight assignment and was routinely stonewalled. Not yet, they said. Kennedy’s reservations about risking a hero’s life were disclosed years later.
Frustrated, Mr. Glenn resigned from NASA in early 1964. But an idea for a new career had been planted in his mind.
Mr. Glenn with his wife, Anna (he called her Annie), in New Concord, Ohio, as he announced his intention to run for the presidency in 1983.Credit D. Gorton/The New York Times
To the Senate, and Beyond
One night in December 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited the Glenns to dinner at his home in McLean, Va. In the course of the evening, the attorney general suggested that Mr. Glenn run for public office. With the backing of a powerful Kennedy, he might have a good chance at a Senate seat from Ohio in the 1964 election.
Mr. Glenn’s parents happened to be among the few Democrats in New Concord, and Mr. Glenn once recalled that he had developed an abiding interest in political affairs from his high school civics teacher, Harford Steele.
Mr. Glenn eventually took the advice, but had to quit the race after being seriously injured in a bathroom fall. He spent the next decade working as an executive of the Royal Crown Cola Company. He still had the space itch, though, and inquired about a possible place on one of the Apollo missions to the moon, but NASA gave him no encouragement.
“Yeah, I would have liked to go to the moon,” he said in later years. “But I didn’t want to stick around being the oldest astronaut in training just hoping to go to the moon. So I went on to other things, and that was a decision I lived with.”
After Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Mr. Glenn headed a bipartisan lobbying group called the Emergency Committee for Gun Control. President Lyndon B. Johnson later signed the Gun Control Act of 1968, placing some restrictions on firearms.
In 1970, Mr. Glenn ran again for the Senate, but lost in the Democratic primary to Howard M. Metzenbaum. Mr. Glenn won the primary four years later and breezed to victory in the general election, beginning a 24-year Senate career.
Over the years, Mr. Glenn earned the respect of Senate colleagues as an upright, candid and diligent legislator. Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, described Mr. Glenn as a “workhorse” who was especially well informed and a forceful voice on defense issues. “When he speaks, you know he’s speaking on a subject of which he has a command and a reason for speaking,” Mr. Graham said shortly before Mr. Glenn’s return to space.
As a senator, Mr. Glenn developed an expertise in weapons systems, nuclear proliferation issues and most legislation related to technology and bureaucratic reform. He generally took moderate positions on most issues, though in his last two terms his voting record became more liberal. He was an enthusiastic supporter of President Bill Clinton.
He drew admiring audiences in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, but his wooden speaking style and lack of a cogent campaign message were blamed for his poor showing at the polls. After losses in several states, he dropped out of the race, which former Vice President Walter F. Mondale won before President Ronald Reagan overwhelmed him in the general election.
The one blemish on Mr. Glenn’s squeaky-clean political reputation came in the 1980s, when he was one of five senators present at a meeting with federal regulators concerning accusations of savings and loan association fraud against Charles H. Keating Jr., a former Ohioan. The meeting smacked of impropriety and political pressure. Because Mr. Glenn had no further contact with Mr. Keating, who eventually was sent to prison, the Senate decided that he did nothing deserving discipline.
As a member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Mr. Glenn developed the medical rationale used in arguing his case for a return flight in space. He offered himself as a human guinea pig in tests of the physiological effects of space weightlessness, like bone-mass loss and cardiovascular, muscular and immune system changes, and how they seem to be comparable to the usual effects of aging.
Mr. Glenn’s return to space in 1998 drew criticism. But the new-old astronaut was not to be denied, and his heroic image, and reawakened memories of the early space age, attracted launching crowds on a scale not seen since astronauts were flying to the moon.
Still healthy and vigorous, though not as agile as in 1962, Mr. Glenn embarked on his second venture in space, as he said in an interview, to show the world that the lives of older people need not be dictated by the calendar.
In 1998, 36 years after his Mercury flight, Mr. Glenn got his wish for a return to orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery. At 77, he became the oldest person to go into space.Credit NASA
A Flier Almost to the End
In recent years, honors continued to come his way: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland was renamed the John H. Glenn Research Center.
In 2012, about a week before the 50th anniversary of the Friendship 7 flight, a reporter found the 90-year-old Mr. Glenn in full voice and clear mind, but regretting that he had sold his airplane the month before. Their aging knees had made it difficult for him and his wife to climb on the wing to get into the cabin of their twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. For years they had flown it on vacations and back and forth to Washington. Though his airplane was gone, Mr. Glenn was pleased to say several times that he still had a valid pilot’s license.
Mr. Glenn was a flier, almost to the end.
In one of the interviews at this time, he was reminded that Mr. Wolfe, the author, had recently judged him “the last true national hero America has ever had.”
Mr. Glenn gave another of his dismissive aw-shucks responses: “I don’t think of myself that way,” he said. “I get up each day and have the same problems others have at my age. As far as trying to analyze all the attention I received, I will leave that to others.”
Correction: December 8, 2016 An earlier version of this obituary, and an accompanying picture caption, misstated the time of the launch of Mr. Glenn’s orbital flight aboard Friendship 7. It was 9:47 a.m., not 2:47 p.m.
Correction: December 8, 2016 An earlier version of this obituary misstated part of the name of the college Mr. Glenn helped found at Ohio State University. It is the John Glenn College — not School — of Public Affairs.SOURCE
Getty ImagesGreg Lake (centre) was one of the biggest stars of the 1970s
Greg Lake, who fronted both King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, has died aged 69.
One of the founding fathers of progressive rock, the British musician is known for songs including In the Court of the Crimson King and his solo hit I Believe in Father Christmas.
He died on Wednesday after “a long and stubborn battle with cancer”, said his manager.
The news comes nine months after Lake’s band-mate Keith Emerson died.
Keyboardist Emerson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, coroners in the US said.
Getty ImagesGreg Lake (right) with Carl Palmer in 1971 as ELP were recording their album Trilogy
Lake’s manager Stewart Young wrote on Facebook: “Yesterday, December 7th, I lost my best friend to a long and stubborn battle with cancer.
“Greg Lake will stay in my heart forever, as he has always been.”
Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett paid tribute on Twitter, writing: “Music bows its head to acknowledge the passing of a great musician and singer, Greg Lake.”
“Another sad loss with the passing of Greg Lake,” wrote Rick Wakeman, keyboardist in prog rock band Yes.
“You left some great music with us my friend & so like Keith, you will live on.”
‘Greatest music made for love’
Born in Bournemouth, Lake was given his first guitar at the age of 12 and took lessons from a local tutor called Don Strike.
He formed a close friendship with fellow student Robert Fripp, with whom he created King Crimson in 1969.
Their debut album In the Court of the Crimson King featured such songs as 21st Century Schizoid Man.
It set a standard for progressive rock and received a glowing, well-publicised testimonial from The Who’s Pete Townshend, who called it “an uncanny masterpiece”.
But within a year, founding member Mike Giles quit and Lake refused to work with the band – although he stuck around long enough to sing on their second album, In the Wake of Poseidon, which was criticised for treading old ground.
‘Love not money’
The singer and bassist was then approached by Emerson, who had supported King Crimson on a North American tour and needed a singer for his new band.
Joined by Atomic Rooster drummer Carl Palmer, ELP made their live debut at the Guildhall in Plymouth in 1970 before giving a career-making performance at the Isle of Wight Festival.
Unusually, the band combined heavy rock riffs with a classical influence. They scored hit albums with Pictures at an Exhibition, Trilogy and Brain Salad Surgery – many of them produced by Lake himself.
Tarkus, released in 1971, featured an opening track inspired by the fictional Tarkus character – a half-tank, half-armadillo creature that would appear on stage at gigs – that lasted more than 20 minutes.
The band went on to enjoy chart success in 1977 with their version of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
ELP’s ambitious light shows and on-stage theatrics were the epitome of ’70s rock excess, and several punk acts cited ELP as one of the bands they were reacting against.
But the band sold more than 48 million records, and Lake continued to be an influential and popular touring musician even after the band wound down in the late 1970s.
In 2010, Kanye West repopularised the King Crimson song 21st Century Schizoid Man when he sampled it in his hit song, Power.
“The greatest music is made for love, not for money,” Lake is quoted as saying on his official website.
“The early ELP albums were pioneering because there is no standing still; time is always moving forward.”
LEONARD B. SAND, JUDGE IN LANDMARK YONKERS SEGREGATION CASE
Judge Leonard B. Sand in 1985 with a map of Yonkers.Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Leonard B. Sand, a federal judge in New York who presided over a 27-year landmark case in which he found that city officials in Yonkers had intentionally segregated public housing and schools along racial lines, died on Saturday at his home in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his son David.
The Yonkers case, which received national attention, was hardly the only lawsuit in which local governments in the Northeast had been charged with racial discrimination, but it was one of the most bitterly contested.
The charges against Yonkers were brought in a lawsuit that the Justice Department filed in 1980 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The case was assigned to Judge Sand, who had joined the court two years earlier.
Though Judge Sand presided over other prominent cases in his long judicial tenure, including terrorism and financial fraud cases, the marathon Yonkers litigation loomed largest in defining his public image.
Some applauded him as rightly following precedents when, in 1986, he ordered that the city remedy the housing portion of its violations by adopting a plan for building up to 1,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing in predominantly white neighborhoods.
They praised him again when he imposed potentially bankrupting fines on Yonkers to overcome its City Council’s repeated defiance of his mandated remedy.
One coalition of civil rights and religious groups cited “his courageous effort to enforce the rule of law in Yonkers.”
Critics, however, viewed him as engaging in “social engineering,” and some called him a “judicial tyrant.” Yonkers officials, who denied they were responsible for the segregation, denounced the judge, as did many white residents, some of whom picketed his weekend home in northern Westchester County.
The clash of wills was dramatized last year in the HBO mini-series “Show Me a Hero,” based on the book of the same title by Lisa Belkin, a former reporter for The New York Times. Bob Balaban portrayed Judge Sand.
Judge Sand, who had a reputation as soft-spoken and patient on the bench, said in an interview with The Times in 1988: “I like to think I have a reasonable perspective on what a judge’s role is in our society. I don’t let it get under my skin. I have a job to do. I think I know what that job is. I find my work satisfying.”
He had been in private law practice in New York City for nearly 20 years when President Jimmy Carter nominated him for the federal court in Manhattan in 1978. After the Justice Department filed its lawsuit against Yonkers — the N.A.A.C.P. joined as a plaintiff later — the judge tried over the next three and a half years to get the parties to reach a settlement, but the effort failed.
After conducting a trial, he ruled in 1985 that “the extreme concentration of subsidized housing that exists in southwest Yonkers today is the result of a pattern and practice of racial discrimination by city officials, pursued in response to constituent pressures to select or support only sites that would preserve existing patterns of racial segregation.”
That pattern, he said, had contributed over three decades to the 1980 census finding that 80 percent of the city’s minority-group population lived in southwest Yonkers. And, he said, it contributed to a segregated school system in which minority students attended “generally inferior facilities” that provided a lesser “quality of educational opportunity.”
The school desegregation program he ordered, including academically enriched magnet schools and busing, was quickly put into effect.
But his housing order was fought for two years by what he called “obstructive and dilatory tactics,” and in August 1988 he imposed the fines: $100 the first day, doubling each subsequent day. Within a month they would total more than the city’s annual budget, $337 million.
An appeals court capped the fines at $1 million a day, but they would still be crippling, and in September the City Council voted to accept the order when two of the defiant Council members reversed their previous votes. But with further litigation over financing and sites, the last of the required housing was not completed — and the case not concluded — until 2007.
Other widely noted decisions by Judge Sand included a 1990 ruling that overturned a ban on panhandling in the New York City subway system. It was the first time a federal court found that panhandling was a free-speech right protected by the First Amendment.
“A true test of one’s commitment to constitutional principles is the extent to which recognition is given to the rights of those in our midst who are the least affluent, least powerful and least welcome,” Judge Sand wrote.
Though Judge Sand said the begging could be restricted by keeping it out of the subway cars, an appeals court reversed his ruling and kept the systemwide ban intact.
Judge Sand was one of the authors of “Modern Federal Jury Instructions,” which since its publication three decades ago has become a leading treatise in federal courts on what judges should tell juries about the law before they begin to deliberate.
Leonard Burke Solomon was born in the Bronx on May 24, 1928. His father, Frank Solomon, was a textile manufacturer, and his mother, the former Dora Sado, was involved in the business. He changed his name to Sand as a young man.
He graduated from New York University and, in 1951, from Harvard Law School. In 1952 he was a clerk to Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who gained national attention a year earlier when he sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair.
In the 1950s Mr. Sand was an assistant United States attorney in Manhattan and an assistant to the United States solicitor general. In 1955, he married Ann Sulzberger, a first cousin of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the former publisher of The Times.
Besides his son David, his immediate survivors include his wife; another son, Robert; a daughter, Peggy Sand; and six grandchildren.
Perhaps Judge Sand’s most prominent criminal trial was that in 2001 of four terrorists who were convicted of conspiring in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people. Two defendants then faced a death penalty hearing, which resulted in life sentences after the jury could not agree on imposing a death sentence.
Daniel L. Stein, a former law clerk to Judge Sand, said the judge recalled years later that in a special verdict form, some jurors noted that the terrorists “were suicide bombers, so why give them what they want?”
Mr. Stein said Judge Sand told him: “Juries get it right. There’s a lot of wisdom in a well-instructed jury.”
Bringing order to chaos, the International Astronomical Union has approved standardized spellings and designations for the traditional names of 212 bright stars.
Astronomers analyzing a new sky survey have found that the distribution of dark matter in the modern universe is smoother than predicted from observations of a far younger universe.
In a spectacular case of bad timing, the full Moon coincides with the annual Geminid meteor shower. Don’t feel put out. There’s still something for everyone, including a consolation prize.
Interested in improving your nightscape photography? Join renowned astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi in S&T’s live webinar on Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Hours before members of the Loyal White Knights (LWK) were set to parade through the streets of Pelham, N.C., to celebrate president-elect Donald Trump’s victory last Saturday, the leaders who helped organize the parade turned on one another.
Riding the wave of attention following the annual conference of the white nationalist National Policy Institute (NPI), and the spike of media attention towards the white supremacist subculture termed the ‘alt-right’, its founder, Richard Spencer, appeared last night at Texas A&M to further spread his racist ideology.
An interview with writer and activist adrienne maree brown about self care, action and how the late, great Octavia Butler predicted this political moment.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 
Femi Folami, 62, Miami, African-American
“I began purchasing racist iconography and objects at age 16, and created a mission for myself that I called ‘Liberating Jemima.’ My mother supported two children after my dad died by being a maid in the homes of others. I felt that by buying mammy items [like the one photographed here] and giving them an honored place in my home, that I was indeed liberating them from the clutches of their ‘owners’ (usually white people) and bringing them home to rest in a household that would hold them in high esteem.”