Hungry Blues

Why have none of the news outlets noted that the case was reported on previously, close to when it occurred, before video of the conflict was released?

Why do none of the news outlets reporting on Ja'eisha Scott and her mother, Inga Akins, make reference to the police report that was included in the earlier coverage?

Ja'eisha was released from police custody after the officers called the pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office.

They were told prosecutors would not charge the girl with battery on a school employee or anything else.

``To think we would consider charging a child of that age with a crime is almost comical,'' said Bruce Bartlett, chief assistant state attorney. [The school principal,] Di Benedetto, 31, was disappointed charges were not filed because it was the third time the girl had behaved violently, the police report says. Di Benedetto declined to comment Thursday.

Why was Di Bendetto "DISAPPOINTED charges were not filed"?

Why is any school principal anywhere invested in having any five year old of any race or gender charged with battery?

If there was a pattern of violent behavior, why didn't the principal respond by having her evaluated and developing an appropriate program of interventions?

Did Ja'eisha need counseling?

Did Ja'eisha have special needs?

Should she have been placed in a different class?

In the more recent St. Petersburg Times coverage, reporter Thomas C. Tobin notes that Ja'eisha

had a history of problems at the school, though the full extent is not known because student records are not public.

District officials have discussed an incident several weeks before the handcuffing in which a city police officer was called to the school because of a behavior problem with the girl. The officer said something to her about the possibility of being handcuffed if her behavior continued.

Akins later objected to that conversation, part of an ongoing feud with the school over her daughter's treatment.

Was the incident "several weeks before the handcuffing" time number one or time number two that "the girl behaved violently?

If it was time number one, why was the school's first recourse to call the police?

Why didn't the school pursue other avenues that would be likely to help Ja'eisha (and her mother) a) address the causes of her behavior, where ever they might reside and b) develop strategies for self-control, if they are needed?

If the "incident" mentioned was time number two, and a pattern of behavior was becoming evident, why was this not an occasion to help Ja'eisha and her mother?

WHY ARE POLICE OFFICERS GOING AROUND PINELLAS COUNTY, FLORIDA THREATENING LITTLE SIX YEAR OLD CHILDREN WITH HANDCUFFS?

UPDATE:
Original, post-videotape-release SP Times article now has a link to the earlier SP Times article that covered the Ja'eisha Scott story when it first came out in March.

What's Race Got To Do With It?

RELATED POSTS:
Arresting Children Under 12 In Florida
It’s a statewide epidemic, and Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, leads the state, along with Hillsborough County, in arresting children under 11 years old.

What’s Race Got To Do With It?

Focus On Pinellas County Schools
• “Black kids are mistreated every day in Pinellas County schools”

• Class Action Suit: “the district has failed to narrow a yawning achievement gap between black and white students, in violation of the equal protection clause in the state Constitution.”

• Criminalizing Children In Florida

Things You May Not Have Read About The Ja’eisha Scott Case
• Accounts Of Police Involvement In Ja’eisha Scott Case Raise New Questions About Assist. Principal Dibenedetto’s Intent

• “I think they were good people . . . [Ja'eisha] didn’t act like that over here.”

An 8-year-old is fingerprinted at the Juvenile Assessment Center in Largo after he was arrested on charges including battery on a law enforcement officer. (Cherie Diez)

What happened to Ja'eisha Scott in St. Petersburg, Florida is part of a statewide trend, which was studied and documented in a special report to the St. Petersburg Times in the year 2000. That's right—five years ago.

Here are some of the relevant statistics:

Pinellas [which includes St. Petersburg] and Hillsborough counties lead the state in cases of children 11 and younger being charged with crimes.

Meanwhile, statewide, there is a stark difference among arrests of children by race -- one that gets sharper as the children get younger. . . .

It's not unexpected that Pinellas and Hillsborough would rank high on the list, because each county is home to more than 100,000 school-age children. Hillsborough County has the third-highest number of schoolchildren in the state, and Pinellas has the seventh-highest number, according to 1998 state Department of Education figures. . . .

The data show 40.5 percent of juveniles 12 and older charged with crimes are African-American. But for children under 12, the percentage jumps to 55 percent African-American.

And for youths in detention centers, the juvenile version of jails, 57.2 percent were African-American.

This is in spite of the fact that roughly 21 percent of school-age children are African-American, according to state Department of Education figures. (Emphasis added.)

Of course the statewide statistics don't necessarily tell us anything about what occurs in Ja'eisha's school system. But information gathered about the Pinellas County school system is grim:

[W]hen the St. Petersburg Times asked the Pinellas school system for felony police reports of kids age 11 and under, it handed over 71 reports for a 16-month period. In other words, more than one per week, and that didn't include misdemeanors.

"We are seeing, from year to year, more things happening in the elementary division," said Joe Feraca, chief of the Pinellas schools' campus police.

Five years ago in Pinellas County, eight kids under 12 went through "juvenile arbitration," a counseling program mostly for young, first-time offenders. Last year the number grew to 139.

Remember these numbers are from 2000, and the incidents were then on the increase since the mid-nineties. I would hazard a guess that the numbers are much worse now.

I meant to blog this story when the Georgia's new, highly restrictive voter ID bill passed the State Senate, but now it's been signed into law (registration required; via ConyersBlog) by Governor Sonny Perdue. The bill makes Georgia the first state in the US not to permit voters an alternative to photo ID, such as a signed affidavit. Representative Conyers' comments are worth repeating here:

It is quite an amazing and discouraging development, and one that we are seeing in other "Red" States. The GOP is clearly engaged in a power ploy, and they are stopping at no means in their effort to eradicate all political opposition. We began with the ruthless effort to stop the Florida recount. Than we had the amazing mid-decade gerrymands in Texas and Colorado (the latter thrown out by the courts), which singlehanded gave the GOP 5 seats in the 2004 elections. We all saw what Ken Blackwell accomplished in Ohio for Bush-Cheney, and this year Georgia has redistricted and is now enacting a new "poll tax" in disguise. Many other states are planning the same discrminatory ploy, such as Indiana.

What really saddens me is that the GOP is doing this with no solid evidence of vote fraud -- that is to say individuals knowingly going to the polls who are not entitled to vote. Please let me know of any documented cases of this occuring in the last decade. I know the new photo id laws will prevent legal voters from voting, but I doubt it will prevent a single case of the intentional vote fraud the bills claim to be aimed at. Is it any wonder minorities are so alienated by the Republican Party?

In response to this development, twenty-one members of Congress have joined Representative Conyers in a letter asking the Department of Justice to throw out the Georgia legislation for being in violation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which applies special scrutiny to states, such as Georgia, with a history of restricting African American voting rights before 1965.

    Our objections to voter identification provisions are grounded in history as well as contemporary evidence.  During their day, poll taxes and literacy tests, which were also said to protect against fraud and breed confidence in elections (as the Georgia law purports to do), had the direct effect of erecting a barrier to minority voters.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 specifically outlawed these and other similar devices because they could be arbitrarily administered by local registrars and state officials in a discriminatory manner.  We strongly believe that requiring government-issued photo identification at the polling place would inevitably create similar barriers and hurdles for racial and ethnic minority voters and would have a chilling effect on voter participation.

    The negative effect of these provisions has been widely recognized at the state and federal level.  Consider the following:

•    The Federal Elections Commission noted in its 1997 report to Congress that photo identification entails major expenses, both initially and in maintenance, and presents an undue and potentially discriminatory burden on citizens in exercising their basic right to vote. The burden of this requirement would fall disproportionately and unfairly upon racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as voters with disabilities, since a disproportionate number have neither identification nor the financial means to acquire it.  For this reason, the vast majority of states recognize the barriers of photo identification and have adopted other identification procedures.  

•    On November 5, 2001 a federal court prohibited the use of an identification requirement, with an alternative signature attestation option, at the polls in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  Both the Department and private plaintiffs argued, and the court found, that "the burden imposed by this requirement will fall disproportionately on the Latin American community, thereby violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. ¡ì 1973."

•    The Department of Justice has taken issue with identification requirements for having a discriminatory impact on minority voters.  In the City of Lawrence case, the Department noted that, "our experience in jurisdictions around the country suggests that minority voters — especially those who do not have the required identification with them at the polls ... — may be disproportionately disadvantaged by such [identification] requirements, either by difficulties at the polling place or by fears of such mishaps that make them unwilling to go to the polls.["]

•    In a directly analogous case, the Department objected to the use of photo identification requirements without also permitting a signature attestation for first time voters under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because it had a disparate impact on minority electoral participation. Since black voters were found four to five times less likely to have photo identification, the Department believed that this requirement would have a "retrogressive effect on the opportunities of black voters" and would likely "have a disproportionately adverse impact on black voters in the state."

    We believe that there are many voters who simply do not have identification and requiring them to purchase identification would be tantamount to requiring them to pay a poll tax.  Moreover, as the Department has argued in the past, the burden of this requirement would fall disproportionately and unfairly upon racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as voters with disabilities, since a disproportionate number have neither identification nor the financial means to acquire it.  A burden such as this, which disproportionately affects minorities, would clearly be retrogressive under Section 5 and not subject to preclearance.

    We know you to be a man of integrity who takes his responsibilities under the law quite seriously, and we would hope that you will not allow such an obvious and discriminatory limitation on voting rights to take effect particularly during the year of the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

    We thank you for your immediate attention to this matter and look forward to meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our views.  Please contact us through the Judiciary Committee Staff, Keenan Keller at 202-225-6906, fax 202-225-7680, B-351 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515 so that we may discuss this critical matter with you.

Very Truly Yours,

Cynthia McKinney, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jan Schakowsky, Bernard Sanders, Linda T. Sanchez, Dennis Kucinich, Adam Smith, Russ Feingold, Charles A.Gonzalez, Jose E. Serrano, Ed Towns, Sanford Bishop, Jr., Melvin, L. Watt, David Scott, John Barrow, Chaka Fattah, William J. Jefferson, Bobby Scott, Joseph Crowley, Charles B. Rangel, John Lewis.

Given its aggressive reversals of its own historic mission to protect voting rights, the DOJ will most likely respond—if it responds at all—in favor of Georgia's voter disenfranchisement bill.

Also see: Some Arguments Against ID Requirements For Voting.

Edgar Ray Killen has been released from the hospital and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood says the state is ready to go in the murder case.

The script for popular liberal condemnation of Killen's crime is already written out. An advance draft was posted at the Neshoba Democrat. Take special note of these sentences; they are your Whitewash Rhythm Changes:

This will be an opportunity to showcase our state and community and tell about the profound, genuine change, not to recoil in denial and bitterness. . . .

Because the murders were such a major turning point in U.S. history, this case is very emotional and is a magnet for extremists on both ends of the spectrum, particularly now that a man known to associate with white supremacists has been accused.

The reputation of our community is on the line. Every, single action will be amplified under the microscope of worldwide media attention. . . .

For 40 years Philadelphia and Neshoba County have been synonymous with redneck vigilante justice, and we’ve been saddled with the “Mississippi Burning” stereotypes. The role of law enforcement in the murder conspiracy seems to amplify the disdain outside observers feel, a certain breakdown in civility and law and order.

Most decent people here have felt the shame of a crime unpunished and applaud justice.

Before us is an historic opportunity to once and for all set the record straight, to do the right thing by bringing the murder or murders to justice.

Last weekend, in Olympia, Washington, Rita Schwerner-Bender (widow of Michael Schwerner) spoke to the upcoming trial quite differently:

"This is still a racist society and racism is still the elephant in the living room of America," she said.

Schwerner-Bender, now 63, is a Seattle attorney practicing mostly in family law and adjunct faculty at the University of Washington Law School. In 1964, she and her husband moved from New York to Mississippi as part of an effort by the Congress of Racial Equality to register black voters. It wasn't long before they felt the angry stares, she said.

Federal authorities investigated her husband's slaying, but no one was convicted. Authorities reopened the investigation last year and arrested Edgar Killen, a former white supremacist leader once nicknamed "the Preacher."

Killen, now 79, allegedly rounded up the mob that ambushed the three men just after they had been released from a local jail.

"I think this is more than just about the trial of one old man. If that was all this is about, I would say we should all go home," she said.

Just after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, the state of Mississippi reacted by establishing the State Sovereignty Commission, which acted as an agency to investigate complaints about those suspected of undermining segregation laws, she said.

It investigated a range of issues, such as potential jurors in the trial of a white supremacist and a complaint from a white woman who was worried about a Black teenage boy who had shown an interest in her daughter.

Then, a state legislator asked the commission to investigate Bender and her husband. The local sheriff's office had them under surveillance and sent their license plate number to law enforcement agencies around the state, many of whose ranks were filled with Ku Klux Klan members, she said.

On the night they were killed, the three men had been stopped by a sheriff's deputy and temporarily jailed. He later released them into a trap set by Killen and a mob of Ku Klux Klan members who beat and shot them.

She urged the audience to realize that when they ignore acts of racism, they become complicit in it, or what she called the "banality of evil." (Emphasis added.)

Comments like Ms. Schwerner-Bender's will assuredly get much less play than the script over at the Neshoba Democrat. But what she says is what everyone ought to hear. Of course that might lead us back to those uncomfortable questions about where to place responsibility for the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner and why Killen is the only man being prosecuted.

Related News:
• New Orleans Man To Testify In Killen Trial
• Security High For Killen Trial

[Jonathan's comments frequently deserve more air than they get in the comment fields of my posts. --BG]

Passover makes me think of the black slave experience in contemporary Sudan. Thursday evening I met a terrific man named Simon Deng who works for a group called iAbolish [www.iabolish.com] (I actually introduced Mr. Deng before he spoke to the Amnesty International club here on campus). Mr. Deng (a former enslaved child in Sudan) spoke to me about Arab slavers who are still killing and enslaving black Africans today. This is form of genocide in the lush jungles of Southern Sudan is equally as disgusting as the problems of mass murder in the desert of Darfur. Mr. Deng was taken as a boy from his village of Tonga in Southern Sudan and brutally enslaved and scarred on all levels before he escaped with the aid of an international buy-back force of anti-slavers.

I have often thought of what it means to be a independent American voter who rejects all parties (and therefore often cannot vote in primaries and other such twisted affairs) and a socialist (for lack of a better word) but the more I learn about the virulent permutations of capitalism, the more I strengthen my intellectual and sociopolitical resolve.

THAT is why your posts on the election fraud are so important to me because that willful debacle equals $-fiending. Many of the guns used to gather slaves in Southern Sudan are German-made and this equals $-fiending. The UN fails to intervene in Sudanese slavery because of pressure by the Arab oil magnets and this equals $-fiending. Condi Rice is pet of power who goes inside the big house, unleashed, when she is called and that is an example of $-fiending too. But I digress, forgive me.

Passover made me think of this world problem.

I am with you in recognition of this crucial, crucial time of Jewish observance.

[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since then, and the post resonates differently—at least for me—with more life lived and more writing and research behind me. Chag samei'ach (happy holiday). --BG

As usual, while I'm here at my mom's house, I'm sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. This time I'm looking through some of the documents from Dad's work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master's thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad's involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and there's a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I'm going to post a little from what I've been reading while I'm here on my Passover visit.

As I study my father's political life I've been interested in the diversity of his involvements and how they were related in his mind. In his resumé that I posted you can see that in the space of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he moved from organized labor, to the disarmament movement, to the Civil Rights Movement. Then he was doing state legislative work for the Liberal Party in the mid to late 1960s. An then the PR campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One document that I found among the papers relating to the campaign to use PR in the NY City Council elections is a fact sheet, dated 1969 and titled "Proportional Representation (P.R.): A Proposal For Complete Representation In The New York City Council." In this 6 page pamphlet, which I presume my father wrote, there's a section called "P.R. And Civil Rights:"

P. R. is of special importance and usefulness for the advancement of civil rights. In the present transition to full and equal citizenship, in fact as well as in law, it means a great deal to the whole community, as well as to the people directly concerned, for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to be able to use their voice in government. This they can usually do, in district elections, only when they stay hived in "ghettoes" like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the dispersal of ghettoes to secure the integration of the community has been a major objective of the civil rights movement.

P.R. will make it possible for a minority candidate to live anywhere and get votes from anywhere in his borough, and if his supporters poll a sufficient minority of the borough's votes - e.g. something approaching a tenth in a ten member borough - he will be elected. Furthermore, P. R. Gives every voter a preferential vote so that if it cannot help elect his first choice, it can be used at full value for his second choice, or if necessary, his third or fourth. Thus nearly ever Black or Puerto Rican voter can help to elect either a trusted Black or Puerto Rican leader or some other candidate who understands his special problems. The last Council election gave us only 2 Black Councilmen out of 37 and one Puerto Rican.

Of course most voters who do not have the special problems of the ethnic minorities will not vote on ethnic lines, other considerations being of more interest to them, and they can all get representation on whatever basis they think best.

The amounts of support given to candidates of different parties are not likely to be greatly changed - they were not when we had P.R. before - for most voters could elect within their own parties candidates who appealed to them on other grounds as well. But if the parties did not offer candidates with a real appeal to the ethnic minorities, those minorities could elect independent candidates of their own who did appeal to them. (3)

This passage captures three important elements of my father's political interests. First, he believed deeply in the value of political process. Second, in PR, as well as in the disarmament movement, we see him drawn to political work that has the potential for broad appeal across various ideological lines. Third, and this follows from the first two observations, my father's political work was always driven by an idealistic yearning for radical social transformation. This was true when he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, USA in the late 40s. But it was also true after he broke with Communism and threw off the mantle of the revolution. For my father, being a Democratic Socialist meant working within the inherently conservative structures of existing political institutions and systems to bring about Utopia.

Another huge topic which I am nowhere near ready to approach is how my father came to Judaism from his life as a radical, secular Jewish Socialist. This journey of his began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time I was growing up here, in Delmar, my dad's sense of himself as a religious man was fully formed. In the 80s and 90s, he loved quoting from a book by Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. The book demonstrates that the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Torah has been the model for the four modern revolutions, the French, English, American and Russian. Walzer refers to Egypt by its Hebrew name, Mitzrayim, a word which literally means narrow place. I can't find Dad's copy of the book in the house right now, so I don't know if the quotation is accurate, but the way he always said it was that at the end of the book Walzer asks, "so what does all this mean?. . . Wherever you are it's probably Mitzrayim and you dream of a promised land. . . . and how do you get there? Organize . . ."

In response to Jonathan, I was bemoaning the paucity of analysis in the blogosphere concerning the story in St. Petersburg covered in my two previous posts, when Jonathan posted a second comment which reads the whole story as a display of white American culture's fear of Black rage.

You know, Benjamin, it seems to me that this story is also about a knee-jerk, centuries-old fear of BLACK RAGE or the presumption of BLACK RAGE (emphasis added).

I'm currently teaching a course in INTRODUCTION TO AFRICANA STUDIES and the white students (the class is mostly white) will accept nothing less than cool, detached rhetoric. We are now moving into a unit on racism, slavery and political economy. I produce commentaries that explain elements of my pedagogy. This shows them the design behind my performative pedagogy. I want them to get a radical, bird's eye view of a teaching practice in motion.

However, these commentaries also give me a chance to formally address matters that arise in lecture/discussions and video screenings.

Here's what my latest commentary on the role of BLACK RAGE said (and I often think of the role of beligerence and biting nastiness in our developmental process when we are not being listened as children or as adults) . . . (emphasis added)

The rest of Jonathan's comment continues at a tangent to the story in St. Petersburg, but is nevertheless a valuable opening into the historical and symbolic dimensions of how African Americans and white Americans experience and express racism. It is also a window into Jonathan's sophisticated approach to teaching. His students are truly fortunate.

But they're out there, and everyone should understand what it looked like when the cops bent five year old Jakisha (?) over a table to bind her hands and cuff her ankles.

Marian tipped me off on this unbelievable story.

March 14, Fairmount Park Elementary School teacher Christina Ottersbach set up a camcorder to record herself teaching for future evaluation. She ended up recording nearly a half-hour of video showing 5-year-old Ja'eisha Scott alternately lashing out and quietly ignoring her teachers' instructions.

The footage starts in Ottersbach's classroom, where assistant principal Nicole Dibenedetto and teacher Patti Tsaousis are trying to calm Ja'eisha down and get her to clean up a mess that she has made. Ottersbach had pulled her other students out of the room because of the girl's unseen outburst, leaving just the three.

"This is your mess to clean up. We need you to stop. You may not do this," Dibenedetto patiently but firmly tells the girl, who stubbornly refuses.

Eventually, Ja'eisha did start cleaning up the mess, but after that, she refused to leave the room. Only when Dibenedetto and Tsaousis asked her to make a choice before they counted to five did she finally leave with them.

Things evidently did not improve after that, however. The tape cuts to Dibenedetto's office, which has been trashed, apparently by Ja'eisha. She is seen ripping papers off the wall and refusing Dibenedetto's requests to stay in a chair.

Ja'eisha even becomes violent at that point, taking countless swings at Dibenedetto, who only puts her hands up to block the girl's punches. The only other time the assistant principal touches the girl is when she lifts Ja'eisha off a table she had twice climbed upon.

Shortly after that, voices are heard saying that police have arrived. Ja'eisha sits in the chair pouting as three uniformed St. Petersburg police officers walk in.

"Do you remember me?" one of them asks Ja'eisha. "I'm the one who told your mom I'd put handcuffs on you."

The officers followed up on that threat, pulling the girl from the chair and handcuffing her behind her back. The anguish on the Ja'eisha's face is evident in the tape, which cuts off seconds after she starts screaming. .

Further coverage here and here. Excerpts from the video are here and here (via Wizbang).

What I want to know—for starters—is why, after quite a bit of googling and technorati-ing, does it appear that Marian the only person on the entire internet to point out that this is about the treatment of African Americans in the US?

I am almost physically ill after watching U.S. television news video of a 5 year old child - a little girl who "just happens" to be Black - first, being set upon by two women - both white - who purportedly are her teachers; then later as the little girl sits quietly - being surrounded and handcuffed by 3 police officers - every one of them also "just happens" to be white.

This is happening in Florida USA. The same Florida of Election 2000 where George Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor. I think CNN reported the town, school system and police department are in St. Petersburg, FL. What kind of country is this? ... Where in the name of God are the voices of the U.S. and international human rights community??? Police - as agents of the government - handcuffing a five year old child. What more does anyone need to witness in order to recognise the continued and escalating criminalisation of being Black. We need an international mobilisation around this.

I also want to know why the teachers kept the camera rolling, at one point turning it to follow the action, and then brought the camera with them to the principal's office to continue recording the incident there. The video record of their actions is of some value in pursuing justice in this matter, but it is also a terrible violation of the little girl's privacy. What did they think they needed the video for? Was it an "opportunity" to study this little girl's behavior? An attempt to cover their asses? Either way there is something deeply wrong about it.

Why the police had to be there at all is beyond me. The St. Petersburg Times indicates the officers showed up at 3:00 p.m. When the school office called the girl's mother at 2:00 p.m., she said she could be there by 3:15. Why couldn't the officers have waited fifteen minutes for the girl's mother to arrive? There is nothing about this situation that makes it appropriate for white police officers to terrorize a Black five-year-old girl. For binding her hands with plastic ties and handcuffing her ankles, the officers should lose their jobs (I bet they don't receive any disciplinary action) and they should do time in some dark corner of our country's God forsaken prison system.

UPDATE: Arresting Children Under 12 In Florida
It's a statewide epidemic, and Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, leads the state, along with Hillsborough County, in arresting children under 11 years old.

What's Race Got To Do With It?

UPDATE: Focus On Pinellas County Schools
• "Black kids are mistreated every day in Pinellas County schools"

• Class Action Suit: "the district has failed to narrow a yawning achievement gap between black and white students, in violation of the equal protection clause in the state Constitution."

• Criminalizing Children In Florida

UPDATE: Things You May Not Have Read About The Ja'eisha Scott Case
• Accounts Of Police Involvement In Ja'eisha Scott Case Raise New Questions About Assist. Principal Dibenedetto's Intent

• "I think they were good people . . . [Ja'eisha] didn't act like that over here."

RP: Well, they are not going to be listened to.

BB: So, you are suggesting that somehow, for some reason, you should have more power over our American democracy than any other American Citizen? Are you kidding me?!

RP: Well, apparently I do have more power because otherwise you wouldn't care so much about what the commission is doing.

BB: Yes, we care, because it's an important commission...It needs to happen...Such a commission is necessary, very necessary...but the way this thing has been fixed and stacked...

RP: It is not stacked.

BB: Who appointed the members of that commission?

RP: The members of the commission are Republicans and Democrats and individual non-partisans...

BB: Who appointed them to this commission?

RP: You have a problem with three or four of the commission members and one of the academic advisors, but there are probably more Democrats than Republicans on the commission...

BB: I don't care how many...This isn't about Democrats or Republicans, Bob. There should be Republicans on the commission...We have no problem with that! What we do have a problem with is Bush/Cheney and Voting Machine Representatives...is the lead attorney from the Kerry/Edwards campaign on the advisory board, Bob? . . .

RP: No he's not. But there are people on the Right that have problems with all the Democrats on the committee.

BB: I don't give a damn about the...There's no problem with Republicans on the committee, Bob...It's not...

RP: Do you know who won the last election?

BB: Uh...Not really...Do you?...

RP: You don't know who won the election?

BB: Not really...I wish I did, but...

RP: The Republicans won the Presidency! And both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate!

BB: How do you know that?...

(Phone conversation, Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog (BB) and Robert A. Pastor (RP), Executive Director, National Election Reform Commission.)

To address the growing number of concerns about the National Election Reform Commission (see previous post), The Brad Blog set up a page on The Velvet Revolution website where anyone who cares to can send a letter of protest to President Carter at the Commission. The Velvet Revolution is a coalition of 100+ election reform and voting rights organizations.

After receiving thousands of emails via the Velvet Revolution page, the Commission's Executive Director, Robert A. Pastor, called Brad Friedman on the phone on Tuesday (4/19) and chewed him out for "harassment." Brad took notes while they spoke, and the dialog above is from their conversation. It is a remarkable conversation, which ought to be read in full.

I am puzzled as to what Republican electoral victories have to do with the selection and conduct of the Commission's members. While some of Pastor's bluster seems due to ignorance of how email and internet communications work, he also seems deeply alarmed that the Commission is a source of controversy. It appears that Pastor was operating under the assumption that his organization would conduct its hearings, make high profile recommendations that undermine the work of the election reform and voting rights communities and then fade out of sight, no questions asked. I hope my readers here will head over to the Velvet Revolution page and help make sure that Mr. Pastor continues to hear that the American public does not consider the Commission, in its current form, a legitimate body for the pursuit of election reform.

I mentioned in my last post that one major source of controversy regarding the Commission is that it is has excluded Representative John Conyers, Jr., from the its ranks. Representative Conyers has investigated the 2004 presidential election tirelessly and has been a constant voice for election reform and voting rights. It is therefore incomprehensible that any national election reform commission would not think his participation essential to its mission.

Yesterday, Representative Conyers met with Mr. Pastor to express his own concerns about the Commission directly.

I had a lengthy, substantive, and frank meeting with Dr. Robert Pastor, Executive Director of the Baker-Carter Election Commission. I shared my concerns about the Commission with him. Among other things, I remain concerned about the involvement of Mr. James Baker, III, in this Commission, and the emphasis of some of the Commission's work thus far. In this meeting, Dr. Pastor displayed great familiarity with my report on the 2004 Ohio Presidential election and expressed his strong commitment to election reform. Dr. Pastor has established an open channel with me to continue discussing these concerns, and I intend to continue this dialogue. I also intend to attend future meetings of the Commission, and personally meet with President Carter and other Commission members. In sum, I want to assure you that I will be monitoring this Commission and its work very closely. In other words, I am on the case.

We're certainly not out of the woods, but it is reassuring to know that Conyers is taking an active role in the Commission, all invitations aside.

The contrast between Pastor's tone and demeanor in his Tuesday conversation with Brad and his civil cooperation with Conyers on Thursday is stark. The change must certainly be in no small measure because of Conyers' unflappable diplomacy. The contrast should also be taken as evidence that public pressure is, in fact, effective and that ongoing vigilance is essential.

If you go The Brad Blog or to The Velvet Revolution, do take note of the new email address for correspondence with Pastor in his capacity as Executive Director of the the Baker-Carter Commission. Representative Conyers and Brad Friedman have asked concerned citizens to use the new address as a good faith measure, in return for Robert Pastor's conciliatory response in the Thursday meeting.

I've been meaning to point readers towards discussion and criticism of the new Carter-Baker Commission On Federal Election Reform (CFER).

The two places to read up on it are The Brad Blog and Representative John Conyers, Jr.'s blog.

The short version of the story is that after the terrible problems in Florida (and elsewhere!) in the 2000 presidential election, a blue ribbon commission was established, with former presidents Carter and Ford at the helm. The Carter/Ford Commission issued a report, decidedly middle of the road in it's policy recommendations, but nevertheless far reaching, delving deeply into the issues and addressing many of the key areas of election reform. The report was a guiding document for the under funded and badly administered Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)—which has turned out to be much more dubious than the tempered, bi-partisan efforts of the Carter-Ford Commission.

After the 2004 presidential election, which had even more disenfranchisement and irregularities than in 2000 (Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, etc.), a new commission was formed, again with President Carter, but this time with former Secretary of State James Baker III as Carter's Republican counterpart. James Baker, you may recall, led the efforts to block the recounts of Florida's votes in 2000. It was Baker's success that led to the US Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush as president and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Florida voters. An odd choice for co-chair, no?

In the lead up to the first FCEF hearings earlier this week, The Brad Blog began covering a related scandal concerning the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), a phony election reform organization, which is really a right wing Republican front group. The leader of ACVR is Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, who is also the National Counsel for Bush/Cheney 04, Inc. ACVR's publicist Jim Dyke was previously the Communications Director for the Republican National Committee. In a Raw Story report on this scandal, Larissa Alexandrovna explains that

Dyke pioneered “astroturf” letters, or letters to the editor that appear to be written by constituents but instead are drafted by political operatives. During the 2004 election, Dyke traveled the country creating what appear to be front groups to disseminate anti-Kerry disinformation. He was also the source of many of the registration irregularity complaints generated in Ohio, and recently set up a Social Security lobby group.

As a spokesman for the RNC, Dyke commented on the Purple Heart bandages he helped distribute: “Democrats continue to try and hide their own candidates’ many positions on the same issue (Iraq) by attacking the president’s leadership.”

ACVR, which is neatly located at a Texas P.O. Box, was invited to join the Baker-Carter Commission on Federal Election Reform within weeks of its formation.

To help publicize ACVR, team Dyke and Hearne turned to Cybercast News Service, which has intimate connections to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, Unfit for Command—a character assassination of Kerry’s Vietnam years—and to the CBS memo controversy through a mutual relationship with Creative Response Concepts a PR firm that deals in political battles.

To make matters worse, ACVR's leader, Hearne, has been seated on the Academic Advisory board for the Carter-Baker Commission.

In her article, Alexandrovna also raises concerns about the partisanship of a number of the other Commission panelists:

Ethics and Integrity Panel:

John Fund is a highly partisan Wall Street Journal editorial board member who has repeatedly attacked election reform activists as conspiracy theorists, stating "When it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts."

Colleen McAndrews is a partner in a law firm representing Governor Schwarzenegger and the treasurer for his campaign. She is considered to be a “behind the scenes force in the Republican Party.”

Elections and Help America Vote Act Current Status Panel:

Kay J. Maxwell is president of the non partisan League of Women Voters, whose strong support for a paperless ballot, despite the demands of hundreds of its members, split the League (here and here).

Gracia Hillman is the chairwoman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is an official part of HAVA. She was appointed by President Bush.

Voting Technology and Election Administration Panel:

Jim Dickson is the Vice President for Governmental Affairs, American Association of People with Disabilities, a highly regarded non-partisan group. He has called all who question electronic voting "geeks."

Nobody from the Kerry/Edwards campaign is on the Carter-Baker Commission. Nobody from any of the numerous election reform groups that worked tirelessly to raise objections to the counting of Ohio's illegitimate electoral votes were invited to participate in the Carter-Baker Commission. And, most shockingly, Representative Conyers was not invited to be on the commission, submit his report [pdf] on Ohio's elections, or to participate in any fashion.

Representative Conyers wrote a letter [pdf] to President Carter, protesting his exclusion and the exclusion of other individuals and groups involved in electoral reform and voting rights. He's also written more on the matter here and here.

Some institutionalized racism is just too important for the courts to let it go.

Via Watching Justice.

On April 12, 2005, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Florida's 137 year old ban on voting for those people who have served their time after felony convictions. Overturning an earlier decision finding that the Florida policy violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Federal Voting Rights Act, the full panel of the 11th Circuit denied all the claims on behalf of more than 600,000 disenfranchised Florida voters. More than one in ten African Americans in Florida today are permanently barred from voting; what the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, which brought the case, calls a "civil rights crisis" in Florida.

The Brennan Center indicates it will appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Now is the time for the Department of Justice to express its views that the civil war era ban on felons voting violates the equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act.

Update: Historical background previously posted on HungryBlues here.

Also see the Prisoners of the Census state impacts page on Florida.

Two Fridays ago (4/8), my mother called to tell me she had just talked with a retired journalist, named Jeff Prugh. Apparently Jeff had come across my posts on the Roosevelt Tatum story, and he wanted to talk with me. Between my father's name and the mentions of Delmar, NY in the Tatum series (I called it "From Delmar to Bombingham"), Jeff figured out how to reach my mother.

Jeff called because he had researched this same story, starting three decades ago, interviewing many of the principle figures who were involved, including the likes of Macon Weaver, the US Attorney who drummed up the case against Tatum in the first place. If you haven't followed the links, or read the posts before, Roosevelt Tatum claimed to have witnessed two Birmingham Police officers planting the bombs that destroyed AD and Naomi King's home on the night of May 11, 1963. The Kings and their five children were in the house when the bombs went off and escaped alive only by good luck. After Tatum made his allegations and made several official statements to this effect, he abruptly retracted his testimony and was then prosecuted for false testimony. Tatum was convicted swiftly and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

Both Jeff and I—as well as Diane McWhorter—have concluded that Tatum was bullied out of his original testimony through a rigged polygraph test, administered by the FBI in Birmingham. Jeff was astonished to find my work in part because until he read this post, he'd made the same mistake that Macon Weaver had in assuming that the Greenberg mentioned in FBI documents was the famous Civil Rights Movement attorney, Jack Greenberg.

When my mother called two Fridays ago, I was lying in bed, trying to recover from a bad cold in time for a job interview on Monday the 11th. I was still under the weather all weekend, and I wanted to use my spare time to prepare for the interview, so I didn't end up calling Jeff back until Tuesday night (4/12).

It was exciting to compare notes with Jeff because we'd reached so many of the same conclusions from our separate research and because we had each learned things that the other hadn't. While Jeff had spoken to many of the people involved—a number of whom are now dead—I had succeeded in getting additional FBI documents on the case declassified. His research led him more deeply into corruption in Alabama regarding Tatum's case; mine had revealed new details about what happened while Tatum was in Washington, DC with my father and AD King (the next part in the Delmar to Bombingham series, still in the works).

Jeff has done some very interesting work on Dan Moore, a federal marshall who tried to expose the rigging of the grand jury that convicted Tatum. In 1999 Jeff published his research in the Marin Independent Journal , the last paper he worked at before he retired (before that Jeff was a LA Times reporter for twenty-one years, including six as Atlanta Bureau Chief). In 2004, he published an expanded version as part of the King family memoir by Alveda King, AD and Naomi's oldest daughter, who was twelve at the time of the bombing. Here's an excerpt from the version in Marin Indpendent Journal:

In June [1963] while Rooselvelt Tatum is being questioned in Washington, Moore becomes incensed when [sic] learns that his boss, U.S. Marshal Peyton Norville, and Judge Allgood participate in selecting the federal grand jury that would indict Tatum.

In sworn testimony, Moore would say that he told a Washington-based official of the U.S. Marshals Service that his boss had bragged to him about putting his son-in-law on the grand jury.

A Justice Department examiner's report in 1964 would say that "...the jury box was one name short. The then Marshal, Mr. Norville, knowing his son-in-law to be a qualified voter, wrote his name on a piece of paper and put into the box. When the Marshal returned to his office he passed this information to the Chief [Moore] in an informal conversation . . . ."

In 1964, Moore would be subpoenaed by an attorney who represented eight white supremacists and who had been tipped about Moore's allegations that U.S. Marshal Norville had told him he had placed his son-in-law on the grand jury. The eight members of the militant National States Rights Party had been indicted by the Tatum grand jury for disrupting efforts to desegregate some of Birmingham's schools.

After the attorney takes Moore's deposition alleging that the grand jury had been improperly impaneled, Moore is called to Judge Allgood's chambers, and, according to Moore, the judge tells him: "You've got me backed against the wall now. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Moore to Judge Allgood: "Throw 'em all out! Dismiss all the indictments [including Tatum's]!

Amid allegations that the grand jury was tainted, the judge drops charges against the whites—publicly citing "fundamental deficiencies" in the indictment—but the judge doesn't let Moore's testimony impugning the grand jury get in the way of the case the feds had built against Roosevelt Tatum.

Dan Moore continues to press for propriety in the federal courthouse in Birmingham. However, he becomes persona non grata. He refuses an offer of a lifetime pension of $3,971 a year ($331 monthly) if he would retire on the spot, after nearly 20 years with the U.S. Marshals Service, and claim what he says would be a bogus disability. He would describe the offer as "a crooked scheme designed to steal public money and to cover up what I knew about obstruction of justice in the Tatum grand jury."

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Earlier the same Tuesday evening that I spoke with Jeff Prugh (4/12), I found a voicemail on my cell phone after I got out of yoga class. The call was from Bob Adamenko, an old friend of my dad's. Back in October, Bob stumbled on Hungry Blues posts from July about Ray Charles and the 1963 concert he played in Birmingham, organized by my father, as a benefit to send Birmingham residents to the March on Washington. In the comments to one post, Bob wrote:

ben, I was a friend of your wondeful father. your mom would rebember me and my wife elaine. please call me at home. after your dad moved up to albany with the family we stayed in touch and eventually lost contact. I was on line doing some research on the liberal party and i came upon hungry blues. please call me any time. I would love to talk to you. Bob Adamenko-[phone # deleted for commentor's privacy] ps. I have the negatives of that show in birminham (emphasis added)

I called Bob immediately, of course, and we had a great, wide ranging conversation—Birmingham, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Liberal Party, CORE, James Farmer, the Lower East Side . . .

Bob had been in charge of security for the concert and had taken pictures. Bob was emphatic that I should have the negatives. "If anyone should have them, you should. They belong to you . . ."

Until last week, that was the last I'd heard from Bob. But then there he was on my voicemail, saying he'd been in the hospital again but he is doing better now and he needs my address so he can send my the pictures. I called Bob as soon as I got home from class. I couldn't catch everything he told me about the negatives because my son (who is now two, by the way) was resisting bed time, and exuberantly showing off his command of two word phrases and multi-syllabic words.

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Last Friday (4/15), I received some interesting mail: 1 oversized, padded envelope, from Jeff Prugh; 1 9 x 12 manilla envelop, from Bob Adamenko; 1 flat, cardboard mailer, 6 x 8 1/2, from Jonathan David Jackson.

Jeff sent me a copy of Alveda King's book and a photocopy of the Marin Independent Journal article (not archived on the paper's website). Bob sent me several contact sheets from the Birmingham negatives, a contact sheet of negatives of scenes from Washington, DC in 1963, the day before the March on Washington, two large prints, and a letter of recommendation that my dad wrote for him in 1976, while Dad was Secretary to the New York State Tax Commission. Jonathan sent me his new chapbook of poems (also see this post).

I spoke with Bob on Saturday, to tell him his envelope arrived. He told me he's sending the negatives next.

One of the prints from Bob was a press photo (at right) from John Lindsay's first appearance after he won the New York City Mayor's race in 1965. Lindsay was a Liberal Republican, with a capital "L" and a capital "R." That is, he ran in 1965 on a joint Liberal/GOP ticket. In 1965, my father was Assistant to Executive Director and Legislative Representative for the Liberal Party of New York, and he was one of the driving forces behind Lindsay's mayoral campaign. In this victory photo, you can see the Liberal Party banner overhead. In front, from left to right, it's Robert Adamenko, Paul Greenberg, and John Lindsay.

I'm not at all certain, but I think that might be my mother, very partially visible behind Bob's left shoulder, standing next to Dad.

Update 7/9/05: Jonathan David Jackson's website is down; links to it removed for now.

Via Watching Justice.

The National Fair Housing Alliance has released its 2005 Fair Housing Trends Report, “[m]ore than 35 years after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, at least 3.7 million fair housing violations still occur annually.” And lack of federal commitment to enforcement is a big part of the problem. The report is based on 2004 housing discrimination complaint data compiled from National Housing Alliance member agencies nationwide, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and state and local government agencies. It finds that problems with fair housing violations continue unabated, even as the federal government's enforcement of the Fair Housing Act against race discrimination has dropped in each of the past three years: between them, DOJ and HUD brought only 30 cases in 2001, 28 cases in 2002, and 10 cases in 2003.

Click here [pdf] to visit the National Fair Housing Alliance and read the 2005 Fair Housing Trends Report.

Click here [pdf] to view the National Fair Housing Alliance press release highlighting the report’s finding that “HUD and Justice Fail to Enforce Fair Housing Law.”