Another Post about PBS Doc African American Lives

Here's a good article from February 2006 reviewing the series, African American Lives. It also talks about some of the science behind the genetic tests used in the program. And yes, this, too, is not reparations related. But it's interesting.

Deep Roots and Tangled Branches
by Troy Duster

People who know their biological parents and grandparents typically take the information for granted. Some have a difficult time empathizing with the passionate genealogical quests of adoptees and, increasingly, products of anonymous sperm banks and other new technologies where one or both genetic contributors are unknown. In recent years, new legislation has enabled people to search for information about genetic progenitors—even in cases where there had been a signed agreement of nondisclosure. The laserlike focus of that search can be as relentless as Ahab's hunt for the white whale.

Mystery of lineage is the stuff of great literature. Mark Twain made use of it for biting social commentary in his Pudd'nhead Wilson, a story about the mix-up of babies born to a slave and a free person. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Dickens built grand tragedy and enduring comedy on the theme. In England in 2002, a white Englishwoman gave birth to mixed-race twins after a mix-up at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Imagine what Shakespeare would have done with that!

If one person's passions can be so riled by such a puzzle, imagine the emotions involved when the uncertainty applies to a whole group - say, of 12 million people. The middle passage did just that to Americans of recent African descent. Names were obliterated from record books, and slaves were typically anointed with a new single first name. Sometimes no names were recorded, just the slaves' numbers, ages, and genders. Some African-Americans have deliberately and actively participated in the erasure, showing no desire to pursue a genealogical trail. For others, fragments of oral history generate a fierce longing to do the detective work.

That is the case among the prominent subjects featured in "African American Lives," a two-night, four-part PBS series scheduled for February 1 and 8. The host and executive co-producer is Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard. Gates has assembled eight notably successful African-Americans, among them the media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and the film star Whoopi Goldberg. Each participant, along with Gates, is the subject of some serious professional family-tree tracing. There are surprises for each of them, and the series has undeniable human-interest appeal.

But there are other reasons why it is likely to be a staple for courses on history, family and kinship, and African-American studies for years to come. Who knew that before the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 250,000 free blacks lived below the Mason-Dixon line? We learn that the kinds of fears that preoccupied them in their daily lives were partially mitigated when they bonded in one place, permitting them to vouch for each other's long-term community standing if a white person came and tried to claim them as slaves.

The first three segments are very much driven by traditional genealogical research, the hard work of ferreting through archival materials, birth and death certificates, deeds, trusts, estates and wills, church records, and, inevitably, the sale of slaves. One of the patterns discernible at the outset is the speed of some tales of rags to riches and meteoric ascendancy from modest circumstance to extraordinary accomplishment. The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, who performed pioneering work in separating twins joined at the head, is the son of a domestic. Winfrey's story is fairly well known - as a child, she was sexually abused and shuttled between homes until finally becoming more settled as a late teenager.

Gates deserves special praise for the way in which he weaves biographies into the larger social and historical context. Reconstruction comes to life in the form of Winfrey's grandfather, Constantine Winfrey, who was illiterate as slavery ended. He taught himself how to read and write, then sponsored a new school, all the while raising a family and tilling the soil. The comedian Chris Tucker's great-grandfather was a beneficent church minister who purchased a large plot of land upon which the sanctuary was built. To keep his congregation together, he sold small plots to members. The Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's ancestors left New England to start a trade school in the South to help the newly freed slaves find employment.

None of the participants knew the rich details of these histories, and the "only in America" element is compelling.

At another level, however, the series performs a disturbing sleight of hand. Conventional wisdom has it that we can choose our friends, but that our families are a given. But with long-term genealogical work, there is a sense in which this can be inverted. We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. As Gates points out in the fourth segment, current technology permits us to link via DNA analysis to only two specific lines. On the Y chromosome, one's father's father's DNA, going back as far as we can locate the genetic material, can be determined with a high degree of certainty. (That is how Thomas Jefferson - or one of his brothers - was definitively linked to Sally Hemmings's offspring.) On the female side, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) can link one's mother's mother's mother going back as far as we can garner the DNA. So, while we have 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents, the technology allows us to locate only two of those 64, if we're going back six generations, as our real legacy and genetic link to the past. But what of the other 62? Those links are equal contributors to our genetic makeup, and we ignore them only because we do not have access to them.

What an arbitrary "choice" of a branch on the family tree!

At one point, upon learning that 50 percent of his ancestry has been traced by DNA analysis to Europe, and that both his maternal and paternal lines are also "European," Gates jokingly asks if he still qualifies to be chairman of African-American studies at Harvard.

But for many, that is no laughing matter. The Black Seminoles are struggling with this very question - whether to use DNA analysis to "authenticate" their relationship to the Seminoles. The reason is straightforward and serious: money. The federal government, pursuant to a land-settlement claim, made an award to Seminole Indians in 1976 and is poised to distribute upward of $60-million.

In 2000 the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma amended its constitution so that members needed to show "one-eighth Seminole blood." The Black Seminoles could use either Y-chromosome analysis or mitochondrial DNA to link themselves through very thin chains back on two edges of the genealogical axis (mother's mother's mother, etc.; or father's father's father, etc.), but that would miss all other grandparents (14 of 16, 30 of 32, 62 of 64).

One attempt to fill in the blanks is the use of a technology called admixture mapping through ancestry-informative markers, or AIM's. Unlike Y DNA or mtDNA tests, this technology examines groups' relative sharedness of genetic markers found on the autosomes - the nonsex chromosomes inherited from both parents.

In the last segment of the series, each of the nine subjects, including Gates, is given information using molecular genetics and computer-assisted analysis of all three kinds of DNA markers. Each of the subjects accepts the ostensibly scientific news of his or her percentage ancestry, deduced by AIM's - that is, African or European or Native American - as if it were of the same certainty as a clerk's entry of a birth date on a certificate. Oprah is crestfallen when she is told that she is not Zulu.

Gates has no match to Africa at all using the conventional tests ? so he deploys Mark D. Shriver, a Pennsylvania State University geneticist at the forefront of admixture mapping, to conduct a special test for him. Gates's autosomes are compared to the small set of African samples Shriver has in his database, from no more than six West African regions. When compared against those few, Gates is closest to the Mende people of Sierra Leone.

Shriver himself seems wary of these results. He surely knows the clusters of DNA are at best crude approximations completely contingent on available samples. Africa has over 700 million inhabitants, and among them it has the greatest amount of human genetic variation found on any of the seven continents. Depending on methods, some regions will be completely missed, while others will be oversampled. The scientists who do the analysis will freely admit that when pressed, but the seekers' eagerness to know spurs a willingness to accept as definitive these artifacts of sampling contingencies.

Ancestry-informative markers (with one exception) are shared across all human groups. It is therefore not their presence or absence, but their rate of incidence, or frequency, that is being analyzed. When taken together, these markers appear to yield certain patterns in people and populations tested. A specific pattern of alleles - corresponding genes on each of a set of chromosomes - that have a high frequency in the "Native Americans" sampled then become established as a "Native American" ancestry result. The problem is that millions of people around the globe will have a similar pattern ? that is, they'll share similar base-pair changes at the genomic points under scrutiny. This means that someone from Hungary whose ancestors go back to the 15th century could map as partly "Native American," although no direct ancestry is responsible for the shared genetic material. AIM's, however, arbitrarily reduce all such possibilities of shared genotypes to "inherited direct ancestry." In so doing, the process relies excessively on the idea of 100-percent purity, a condition that could never have existed in human populations.

To make claims about how a test subject's patterns of genetic variation map to continents of origin and to populations where particular genetic variants arose, the researchers need reference populations. The public needs to understand that these reference populations comprise relatively small groups of contemporary people. Moreover, researchers must make many untested assumptions in using these contemporary groups to stand in for populations from centuries ago representing a continent or an ethnic or tribal group. To construct tractable mathematical models and computer programs, researchers make many assumptions about ancient migrations, reproductive practices, and the demographic effects of historical events such as plagues and famines. Furthermore, in many cases, genetic variants cannot distinguish among tribes or national groups because the groups are too similar, so geneticists are on thin ice telling people that they do or don't have ancestors from a particular people.

Instead of asserting that someone has no Native American ancestry, the most truthful statement would be: "It is possible that while the Native American groups we sampled did not share your pattern of markers, others might since these markers do not exclusively belong to any one group of our existing racial, ethnic, linguistic, or tribal typologies." But computer-generated data provide an appearance of precision that is dangerously seductive.

There is a yet more ominous and troubling element of the reliance upon DNA analysis to determine who we are in terms of lineage, identity, and identification. The very technology that tells us what proportion of our ancestry can be linked, proportionately, to sub-Saharan Africa (ancestry-informative markers) is the same being offered to police stations around the country to "predict" or "estimate" whether the DNA left at a crime scene belongs to a white or black person. This "ethnic estimation" using DNA relies on a social definition of the phenotype. That is, in order to say that someone is 85 percent African, we must know who is 100 percent African. Any molecular, population, or behavioral geneticist is obliged to disclose that this "purity" is a statistical artifact that begins not with the DNA, but with a researcher's adopting the folk categories of race and ethnicity. With the demonstrable skew of the incarcerated population over the last few decades along social categories of race, African-Americans need to be particularly sensitive to the use of phenotype as the starting point for understanding genotype.

The fourth part of "African American Lives" would have benefited from a lot more scientific humility about just how much we can know about our "percentage ancestry." Oprah may have some Zulu (among the "other 62") in her lineage that current technology can neither tap nor exclude. And since nothing in the current state of scientific knowledge can rule that out, we should be so informed by an otherwise enlightening series. The Bantu migration entailed massive movements of people across the African continent. So it is possible that as a "West African," Oprah could indeed have a Bantu link somewhere in the ancestral pedigree. That this possible link might not be called Zulu is more a function of social definition and historical effect.

So, since the jury is still out, don't resign your post, Professor Gates. And nervous jokes aside, let's all recognize that scientific imprecision on matters of identity and identification have implications far graver than the undermining of a TV program's entertainment value.

"Oprah's Roots": Discovering and Owning Our Past

I watched PBS's Oprah's Roots and it is wonderful. If you didn't watch it, try to catch it on reruns. This was a supplement to last year's program entitled African Americans Lives where it looked at several famous African Americans' family lineages. Oprah's Roots went more in-depth into Oprah's family history. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traced Oprah's lineage back on both sides of her family, to her slave ancestors and all the way back to Africa.

At times, the program was very moving. I, too, like many African Americans, long to learn my family history. This program gave me hope that it is possible to trace them all the way back to a specific tribe in Africa; something that has never been dreamed of being possible until now.

In February 2008, according to Boston Herald, there will another African American Lives program featuring Beyonce Knowles, Morgan Freeman, and Tina Turner. Also there will be a contest for the chance of an average African American to be featured.

In a way, this program is akin to reparations. It was partially funded by PBS and PBS gets it funding from the federal government. And why shouldn't our government pay? What a great idea for the government, that worked to destroy the roots of African Americans, to reverse the damage by sponsoring these kinds of programs.

The federal government should go further (and it has in part) to provide the resources to African Americans who are trying to reconstruct their past. In some cases, the federal government could just make accessible what is already open to its citizens. Many African Americans cannot afford hiring genealogists to trace their roots. Making the documents held at the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress available online would be a great start. Some are already available, but the majority are not.

ACTION PLAN
Here are some ideas for you to start tracing your roots:

1.Visit the National Archives and Records Administration and learn about how you can trace your own roots. They have great ideas on how to start your search and even host seminars in various locations around the country.

2. Start talking to your family members and write or record what they say. This is the first step in doing a genealogy of your family. Try to collect documents, letters, bibles, and memorabilia. You will need this along with their stories to start reconstructing the past.

3. Become a part of the National Geographic Human Genome Project and at the same time learn about your genetic ancestors for the cost of a Benjamin! For a more in-depth analysis there are other, more expensive tests you can do. Check out this website for other places that can trace your DNA.

4. Write to your congressman about sponsoring bills that would provide more funding to initiatives to digitize the collections held by our government.

So go out there and discover your roots.

Barclays’ apartheid past further taints Atlantic Yards project

I am suprised that ACORN has come down on the side of big business.

Barclays’ apartheid past further taints Atlantic Yards project
by TANANGACHI MFUNI
Amsterdam News Staff
Originally posted 1/25/2007

The Atlantic Yards Nets stadium isn’t the only controversial “Atlantic” project banking giant Barclays is affiliated with.
The British bank--which announced last Thursday it purchased the naming rights to the divisive Brooklyn arena--also invested in the trans-Atlantic slave trade 300 years ago, angry Brooklyn leaders say. Barclays also has a history of profiting from South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Jewish holocaust.
“The reason why they are the largest bank in the world is because they financed slavery, supported apartheid in South Africa and took financial awards from holocaust survivors,” charged Downtown Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James in a phone interview. [more]

TV: Oprah looks for her roots

Check out Oprah's new series tonight at 8pm, "Oprah's Roots." I loved African American Lives, the documentary about Henry Louis Gates, Jr. helping several well-known African Americans trace their genetic and family history. It was really inspiring. I am still trying to do this myself. Here's a link to a review of the tonight's program: "Back to her future: Oprah Winfrey traces family roots on 30th anniversary of landmark miniseries

NYT: "In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide"

This is an interesting article. Totally not reparations related.

January 23, 2007
In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide
By NOAM COHEN

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.

The plaques may go, but they have spawned an energetic debate about folklore versus fact, and who decides what becomes the lasting historical record.

The memorial’s link between Douglass, who escaped slavery from Baltimore at age 20, and the coded designs has puzzled historians. But what particularly raised the historians’ ire were the two plaques, one naming the code’s symbols and the other explaining that they were used “to indicate the location of safe houses, escape routes and to convey other information vital to a slave’s escape and survival.”

It’s “a myth, bordering on a hoax,” said David Blight, a Yale University historian who has written a book about Douglass and edited his autobiography. “To permanently associate Douglass’s life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best.”

The quilt theory was first published in the 1999 book “Hidden in Plain View,” by Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and college English instructor from Denver, and Raymond Dobard, a quilting and African textiles expert. It was based on the recollections of Ozella McDaniel Williams, a teacher in Los Angeles who became a quiltmaker in Charleston, S.C. “Ozella’s code,” the book says, was handed down from slave times from mother to daughter. Ms. Williams died in 1998.

According to “Hidden in Plain View,” slaves created quilts with codes to advise those fleeing captivity. What looked to the slave master like an abstract panel on a quilt being “aired out” on a porch in fact represented a reminder, say, to be sure to follow a zigzag path to avoid being tracked when escaping. In Ms. Williams’s account, there was a sequence of 10 panels to guide an escaping slave, beginning with a “monkey wrench” pattern meaning to gather up tools and supplies and concluding with a star, a reminder to head north.

The authors say that people have tried to make too much of the book, which they intended to be one family’s story. “I would say there has been a great deal of misunderstanding about the code,” Dr. Dobard said. “In the book Jackie and I set out to say it was a set of directives. It was a beginning, not an end-all, to stir people to think and share those stories.”

Even before the book was published, the codes in “Hidden in Plain View” got a boost from “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which had Dr. Dobard, a quilter himself, as a guest in November 1998. The show was rebroadcast on Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 1999, the day before the book was published, according to Janet Hill, who edited it and is now a vice president of Doubleday. That same day, Ms. Hill wrote in an e-mail message, the book was featured in USA Today. “The book seemed to take off from there,” she wrote.

There are currently 207,000 copies in print, she said. The codes are frequently taught in elementary schools (teachers have been eager to take up the quilting-codes theory because of its useful pedagogic elements — a secret code, artwork and a story of triumph), and the patterns represent a small industry within quiltmaking.

Algernon Miller, who designed the memorial site, said he “was inspired by this story line,” which he discovered in the library. His was a re-interpretation, he said, noting that he was “taking a soft material, a quilt, and converting it into granite.”

“Traditionally what African-Americans do is take something and reinterpret into another form,” he said.

The team of Mr. Miller and a sculptor, Gabriel Koren, were selected in January 2003, from six proposals in a competition organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem. While the project, which involves rebuilding roadways, will cost more than $15 million in city, state and federal money, the 15,000-square-foot plaza and sculpture were commissioned for $750,000. It’s unclear how much it would cost to redesign it now. The memorial, at 110th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, is expected to be completed in fall 2008.

Professor Blight raised his concerns shortly after reading an editorial column in The New York Times in November praising the project and treating the quilting codes as fact. He posted a message at an online discussion group for historians of slavery. “Unfortunately, this UGRR quilt code mythology has also managed to make its way onto the very permanent and very important Frederick Douglass Memorial,” he wrote, using initials to refer to the Underground Railroad. “Douglass never saw a quilt used to free any slaves in his day. Why do we need to pin this nonsense on him now?”

Dozens of postings later, one commentator this month posted a note cautioning that the discussion was threatening to “degenerate into an episode of ‘Historians Gone Wild.’ ”

“We are watching in real time an unfolding of belief in a story,” said Marsha MacDowell, a quilting expert and an art professor at Michigan State University. “It will take years to undo. It’s like Washington chopping down the cherry tree. It has finally been written out of the history books.”

Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission, rattled off the historians’ problems in a telephone interview: There is no surviving example of an encoded quilt from the period. The code was never mentioned in any of the interviews of ex-slaves carried out in the 1930’s by the Works Progress Administration. There is no mention of quilting codes in any diaries or memoirs from the period.

Mr. Miller responded to critics: “No matter what anyone has to say, they weren’t there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret.”

John Reddick, who works for the Central Park Conservancy and helped shepherd the project through its financing and community board approval, noted that in less than a decade “Hidden in Plain View” had become “a touchstone to creative people” and compared the quilt code to the coded language in Negro spirituals. “Take ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ ” he said, “the slave master thinks you are talking about dying, and the slaves are talking about getting away.” He also noted the paradox of historians demanding written evidence when slaves were barred from learning to read and write.

On Ms. Winfrey’s show, Dr. Dobard appeared with the black descendants of Thomas Jefferson. That relationship was preserved in oral history across the centuries, even as historians of the past generally dismissed the claim. DNA tests published in 1998 are considered to have confirmed Jefferson’s paternity.

A spokeswoman for Harpo Productions, which produces the show, had no comment on the controversy.

A historian, Christopher Moore, who is research coordinator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, was consulted on the printed material in the memorial, which includes many quotations from Douglass.

In an interview, Mr. Moore said that as an unpaid consultant reviewing the project, he focused on the Douglass material, and gave cursory attention to the quilts.

When told of the historians’ objections, Mr. Moore said “it was a mistake” to include the text explaining the codes. He said he has since been asked to write a historically accurate text for the memorial.

Ms. Levin said she thought the memorial’s larger quilting theme was appropriate. “Something can inspire an artist that is not be based in fact,” she said. “This isn’t a work of history, it’s a work of art.”

Charlotte Observer: "Democrats apologize for 1898 violence"

Finally a government body recognizing the linkages of our country's past to the tyranny practiced on Iraq by our country today. The anti-war movement and the Reparations movement are linked in this.


Democrats apologize for 1898 violence
State chair on racial conflict in Wilmington: `We're a different party'
JIM NESBITT
(Raleigh) News & Observer

ELON - The ruling body of the N.C. Democratic Party took a stand on searing issues of the past and present Saturday, adopting a resolution apologizing for the party's role in what is known as the 1898 Wilmington race riot and another calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

The first nonbinding measure repudiated the role of party leaders in the racially motivated violence of Nov. 17, 1898. Dozens of black citizens were killed in the fray, which terrorized and banished black businessmen, community leaders, journalists and their white allies.

The second measure, on the Iraq war, proved more controversial, drawing impassioned responses from several committee members. Their words reflected a split in Democratic ranks across the country between young, anti-war liberals older Democrats who don't want to dishonor the sacrifices of American troops.

"I do not see anything in this resolution that says we do not support the troops," said committee member Don Davis, mayor of Snow Hill in Greene County.

The Iraq war resolution notes that the fall election gave control of both the U.S. House and Senate to Democrats and calls for support of any measure that starts the withdrawal of troops by the summer of this year. It also calls on Congress to bar money for any permanent American bases in Iraq.

The Wilmington resolution, by contrast, drew no debate and was passed unanimously.

The violence of 1898 was the most notorious act of a white supremacy campaign that resulted in laws that denied the vote to blacks and poor whites across the state. The conflict gave rise to Jim Crow legislation that instituted segregation that remained in place until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

State party Chairman Jerry Meek, who was unanimously re-elected by the committee Saturday, said the apology was an attempt to address the role of Democratic leaders and leading newspapers of the state -- including The (Raleigh) News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer -- in the riot and the party's subsequent statewide reign as proponents of white supremacy. That role was detailed in a 464-page report released in May by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission.

"Coming on the heels of the commission report, it's unmistakable our predecessors in the party played a significant role in disenfranchising African Americans, and I think there's a need to reflect upon that role and show that we're a different party than we were in 1898," said Meek, who initiated the resolution.

The resolution drew a lukewarm response from a leading member of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission and one of the state's top civil rights leaders. While both men praised the party's apology as a good first step, they said the party should pressure legislators to adopt the commission's 15 recommendations for redressing a historic wrong.

Those recommendations include establishing a Restructuring & Development Authority endowed by governments, media and businesses -- particularly those that benefited from the riot and subsequent takeover of state government by white supremacists. The commission also recommended creating a system for hearing claims for reparations by heirs of victims.

"Certainly, an apology is the minimum thing that is required," said Irving Joyner, a commission vice chairman and a law professor at N.C. Central University in Durham. "I would hope they would go further and look at all the recommendations in our report and seek to get all or some of them enacted by the legislature.

"That would show they are really serious about the apology and righting the wrongs of that overthrow."

OBIT: Co-Founder of Modern Reparations Dies

This ran in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Very interesting person.

THE LIVES THEY LIVED; Segregationist Dreamer: MILTON HENRY b. 1919

Article Tools Sponsored By
By FRANCIS WILKINSON
Published: December 31, 2006

In the 1960s, the phrase ''by any means necessary'' became a password of black militancy. But it had as many meanings as there are shades of brown. It was at once an authentic call to self-defense and the slipperiest cliché in the radical grab bag; a gauntlet hurled in exasperated defiance and an open invitation to thuggery. What ''means'' were truly ''necessary'' -- and to what end?

The question must have kept Milton Henry up nights, simultaneously stoking his righteous anger and testing his Christian forbearance as he desperately sought a way around the awful American dilemma. Like his brothers in the black-power movement and his white neighbors in affluent Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Henry never unwound America's racial tangle. But he led a remarkable life trying.

Born in Philadelphia in 1919, Henry was raised in a cultured Christian home chock full of professional aspirations for the family's 12 children. In World War II, Henry was inducted into the elite, all-black Tuskegee Airmen. While stationed in Alabama, he punched a white bus driver who had demanded that Henry use a rear entrance -- a decade before Rosa Parks instigated the Montgomery bus boycott. A group of British cadets on Henry's bus protected him from retaliation, probably saving his life.

After the war, Henry graduated from the historically black Lincoln University and traveled Philadelphia's black neighborhoods, discouraging young men from enlisting in the segregated armed forces. When a friend arranged to take an admissions exam at Yale Law School, Henry accompanied him and took the test, too. His friend was denied admission; Henry won a scholarship.

After graduation, Henry moved with his wife, Marilyn, and their young daughter to Pontiac, Mich., where in the 1950s Henry won election as a city commissioner, filed (and lost) one of the first school desegregation cases in the North and quickly became a role model for younger blacks.

''I had seen black lawyers before,'' says Elbert L. Hatchett, a Pontiac lawyer who told me he was inspired by Henry to attend law school. ''It's just that he's the first lawyer I ever saw who had the perception, the courage, the command of language -- he had it all.''

Frustrated by the pace of change, Henry was soon drawn to black nationalism. He met Malcolm X and traveled with him to Cairo to meet African leaders. Henry helped organize the 1963 conference in Detroit at which Malcolm delivered his Message to the Grass Roots. (A lifelong audiophile, Henry recorded and released the speech on his own record label.) He was a pallbearer at Malcolm's 1965 funeral.

By 1968, Henry and his brother Richard had adopted African names and developed a vaulting plan for racial separation. The Republic of New Africa, a socialist black nation, would be carved out of five Southern states with large black populations. In a move that helped ignite the contemporary reparations movement, the brothers demanded $400 billion in compensation from the U.S. government to descendants of slaves. Their offer to begin negotiations between the two nations received no reply.

Even as he staked his claim to a separatist dreamscape where the color of one's skin would be no less significant than the content of one's character, Henry kept his feet planted in the law and in the white-dominated court system in which he continued to represent clients. Then the dream turned violent.

Like the Black Panthers, the R.N.A. featured a cadre of young black men armed with rifles. At a March 1969 R.N.A. meeting at Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church, a shootout erupted between the police and R.N.A. militants. Henry wasn't involved. But a young police officer was killed and another was wounded.

The R.N.A. splintered after the shooting. Henry's brother, now known as Imari Obadele, led a group to Mississippi to begin acquiring land. (Following another shootout, he went to jail on dubious conspiracy charges.) Henry stayed behind, remaining personally loyal to his brother while distancing himself politically. ''He did not want to be involved in the violence,'' says Godfrey Dillard, a longtime friend and Detroit lawyer.

Then, on a business trip to Ghana in the early '70s, Henry had an epiphany. He took a drive in the countryside where, according to an unpublished interview with Henry by Nick Salvatore, author of ''Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church and the Transformation of America,'' he happened upon a vestige of colonialism.

''I came upon this old English church,'' Henry told Salvatore in 2000, which had ''a weather-beaten sign out in front of it with the words of Paul on it: 'Know ye not but you are not your own. You've been born with a price, even the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.' ''

Henry returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Ashland Theological Seminary, determined to become a preacher. He continued practicing law (with his reputation for highlighting race when it suited his client's interests undiminished). But on Sundays, he preached from the pulpit of Christ Presbyterian, a church he founded in Southfield, Mich.

After having helped steer the civil rights movement to the brink of militant separatism, Henry had pulled back from the precipice. He didn't renounce the separatist path; he simply ceased to travel it, finding other means. He returned to his religious roots unbroken and unbowed, with both his spiritual bearings and political energy intact. His funeral included representatives of the Tuskegee Airmen, an honor guard of the Republic of New Africa and a phalanx of prominent lawyers, judges and clergy. All claimed him.

Virginia State Lawmakers says to Blacks "Get Over It"

Posted on the N'COBRA listserv and carried by the Houston Chronicle and many other news organizations, Virginia State Lawmaker Frank Hargrove tells African Americans to get over slavery. Virginia State Legislature is considering a measure that would apologize for its involvement in slavery. I'm feeling a "macaca" moment.

Lawmaker Under Fire for Slavery Comment

By BOB LEWIS

AP

RICHMOND, Va. (Jan. 16) - A state legislator said black people "should get over" slavery and questioned whether Jews should apologize "for killing Christ," drawing denunciations Tuesday from stunned colleagues.

Del. Frank D. Hargrove, 79, made his remarks in opposition to a measure that would apologize on the state's behalf to the descendants of slaves.

In an interview published Tuesday in The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Hargrove said slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War and added that "our black citizens should get over it."

The newspaper also quoted him as saying, "are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"

Black lawmakers swiftly denounced Hargrove's comments.

"When somebody tells me I should just get over slavery, I can only express my emotion by projecting that I am appalled, absolutely appalled," said Del. Dwight C. Jones, head of the Legislative Black Caucus.

Del. David L. Englin also criticized Hargrove's remarks, recalling that his grandparents were driven from their homes in Poland "by people who believed that as Jews, we killed Christ."

When Hargrove rose to speak, he told Englin he didn't care about Englin's religion. "I think your skin was a little too thin," Hargrove said as lawmakers gasped and groaned.

Celebrate Martin Luther King Day Part II

It is exciting that a new memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is being built right on the Washington Mall. I visited the current memorial last summer while visiting Atlanta and I must say I was slightly disappointed. You could see how it was once quite beautiful with a stone etched with Dr. King's famous words "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last" in the middle of a reflecting pool. But the condition of the building that held many artifacts from King's and Coretta Scott King's life was old and in dis-repair. It shows how much our national parks have been affected by the ever increasing cuts to its budget to a point where it cannot repair its own memorials and sites.

So I am thrilled to know that a new memorial will built next to the Lincoln Memorial. It will reflect the re-birth of the Dream and not its slow death that the current national site in Atlanta hints to.

One interesting side note about one corporate sponsor, Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers uses Aetna Insurance as their main health insurance provider for their 25,000 employees. The $1 million that was pledge for the memorial, I feel is just a drop in the bucket next to the 10s of millions of dollars paid to Aetna every year. Remember this when praising some of these corporations for donating money. They should be giving more or do a more meaningful act by not using Aetna as their health insurance provider if they are interested in showing their support for the African American community.

Celebrate Martin Luther King Day

Tomorrow is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, J. and we should reflect on whether we have fulfilled and upheld his dream. Indeed, our country is being tested in these trying times post 9/11. Unfortunately, I fear we are trampling on the civil rights of others in order to keep our country safe. We must remember that these very same arguments our government use to defend their actions today, were used to hold back and terrorized African Americans in the past.

Well, enough of my beef with the Bush administration This is a blog about reparations and tomorrow is Dr. King's birthday. So, to be appropriate, I will cite here where Dr. King spoke in support of reparations.

From King's 1964 book Why We Can't Wait:

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries…Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of a the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.

Go celebrate Dr. King's birthday tomorrow by purchasing his book (or watch/listen to his "I have a dream" speech).

Why We Can't Wait
By Martin Luther King, Jr.
Amazon.com $6.95

March on Washington video

Peace!
Salimah

Richmod: Resolution to offer slavery apology

This news is a bit old but interesting: the heart of the South and Confederacy will offer an apology for supporting slavery.

Resolution to offer slavery apology
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Wednesday, January 3, 2007

As Virginia prepares to observe the 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown, several African-American leaders think it's time to apologize for slavery.

A resolution that will be introduced in the General Assembly will express the General Assembly's "atonement" for slavery on behalf of the state. It also calls for racial reconciliation.

A similar resolution is being prepared on behalf of Native Americans in Virginia.

The first slaves were brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619.

Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, and Del. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, are co-sponsors of the resolution.

This story can be found at: http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD/MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1149192470355

Balt. Sun Opinion: "Give Respect to Intentions of Ancestors"

Good opinion piece about the recent 7Th Circuit Court of Appeals decision. Her book also sounds interesting, tracing her lineage through DNA and family history. This is something I would like to do in the future.

Give respect to intentions of ancestors
By Pearl Duncan
Originally published January 7, 2007
Last month, judges in the reparations case in federal court in Chicago ruled that the plaintiffs - "American descendants of slaves" - could sue the defendants - companies that participated in and benefited from slavery - for consumer fraud if the companies hid the history of their slave-related activities to attract customers who would not do business with them if the details were known.

The companies can be sued for misleading consumers by concealing their involvement in the 19th-century American slave trade.

But the court also ruled that these descendants cannot sue for reparations, based on injury or damage to their ancestors, because the statute of limitations has expired.

I was surprised to read, amid all the legal arguments, the judges' citations of economic theories of "intergenerational mobility" and "correlation of wealth across generations." Essentially, these arguments center on what our ancestors intended for us. In order to prove standing, the judges said, descendants had to identify, cite and prove bequests left by ancestors. As I considered this very high bar that the court had set, I wondered what future generations would say about the bequests we left - or failed to leave - for them. As a person of modest means, I have no financial bequest, but I am committed to leaving a cultural bequest for future generations. Such a bequest can consist of activity in the arts, in community development, in civil rights. People who tell stories about their lives, their communities and their times also leave cultural legacies.

There is an expiration on legal bequests, but is there one on cultural or historical bequests? When Congress abolished slavery on Dec. 18, 1865, did it bequeath anything else?

According to the court, the challenge for descendants of slaves - the bar they had to scale to win the full reparations case - was complex and multifaceted: "If one or more of the defendants [banks, insurance companies, railroads, etc.] violated a state law by transporting slaves in 1850, and the plaintiffs can establish standing to sue, prove the violation despite its antiquity, establish that the law was intended to provide a remedy ... to lawfully enslaved persons or their descendants, identify their ancestors, quantify damages incurred, and persuade the court to toll the statute of limitations, there would be no further obstacle to the grant of relief."

The court cited the "political-question doctrine," that federal courts cannot adjudicate disputes that the Constitution entrusted to other branches of government. Specifically, the events cited in these cases occurred prior to the establishment of the 13th Amendment, and in some cases prior to the Civil War. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but - despite proposals at the time to compensate former slaves and their descendants - it was unable to do much more for the ancestors who had been enslaved for almost 250 years in America.

This current case, which delves into our ancestors' intent, was brought by American descendants of slaves, of which I am one. I have found written records that speak to the intent of slaves regarding their descendants. Records as far back as 1726 and oral history from the 1600s in the British colonies in the Caribbean indicate that these ancestors wanted the best for their descendants. In my research, I uncovered secret birth and baptismal lists of slaves and free people, as well as wills and trusts of merchants and nobles. Black and white people alike risked imprisonment, fines, deportation and torture to leave a record of their children, who were descendants of slaves. They left records that communicated with future generations. Are we doing the same for our future generations?

Before there are additional court cases, before Congress and the executive branch can act on behalf of ancestors who intended for their descendants to be compensated for the injury done to them, we must understand the culture and history of all our ancestors.

When President Bush spoke last year at the convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he said that our African-American ancestors were "second founders" in America. But these "founders" were held in slavery, in violation of the future Constitution.

What did people of those generations do to mend the injury that was done to them? Did they say what they intended for us? And how will we say what we intend for future generations?

Pearl Duncan is the author of the forthcoming book, "DNA, Courage & Ordinary Folks," about using DNA, folk stories and genealogy to trace ancestors. Her e-mail is pearlduncan@att.net.