The Crisis back issues from May 2003:
Landmark gun lawsuit may be undermined by congressional action
May 01, 2003; ... The NAACP brought an unprecedented civil suit against the gun industry July 12, 1999, accusing 85 gun manufacturers and distributors of insufficiently regulating the sale and distribution of handguns. Almost four years later, litigants in NAACP et al v. American Arms, Inc. et al finally faced ...
Books in brief
May 01, 2003; ... Mandela, Mobutu and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey, by Lynne Duke (Doubleday, $24). Lynne Duke spent four years, from 1995 to 1999, as The Washington Post's Johannesburg bureau chief. In gripping detail, this memoir recounts her rare experience as a Black American woman covering war, ...
Braving my little sister's call to war
May 01, 2003; ... She did it just to make me mad, just to make me yell, "Moooomm!" My sister Devan would show up whenever my friends and I were playing my treasured electronic football set, the kind with the little plastic men. She would stand there and watch for a while; then all of a sudden a shoe would ...
A narrative journey South to understanding
May 01, 2003; ... Trudier Harris' collection of memoirs, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, is suffused with a sense of her Southernness: from her peculiar first name, to her memories of the sociability of summer porch sitting, to her admiration of the work ethic wisdom of cotton picking ...
New author tries taking it to the streets
May 01, 2003; ... In the late '60s, a self-proclaimed former "pimp" writing under the name Iceberg Slim achieved an underground reputation for novels such as Pimp, Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. A few years later, Donald Goines followed suit with his own brand of "street" realism - tales full of hustlers, ...
NAACP honors the arts
May 01, 2003; ... It was a night of glitz, glamour and glory, as a who's who of Black Hollywood came out for the 34th NAACP Image Awards held March 8 at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. The theme of the evening was "Image- A- Nation" and who could imagine a more fitting celebration of Black ...
Once upon a time in America
May 01, 2003; ... Locals struggle to preserve Idlewild, once a thriving Michigan resort haven for the Black intellectual and cultural elite It was a hot summer day in July 1954 when a police detective approached his friend, a young Detroit businessman, John O. Meeks, and asked him to ride with him up to ...
Edgy Texas romp stars Motley Crew
May 01, 2003; ... "If you write simply, the larger themes will come," said Suzan-Lori Parks about her play Topdog/Underdog, which in the spring of 2002 garnered her rave reviews on Broadway opening night, and the next day made her the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for ...
A scholar's life told strictly by the book
May 01, 2003; ... Long before there were endowed chairs and Ivy League dream teams, before there were collegiate bidding wars to attract Black talent, there were ad hoc thought committees bent on proving that the term Black scholar was not an oxymoron. At least since the days when Frederick Douglass stole ...
Where have all the opera divas gone?
May 01, 2003; ... Speak the word diva and a host of images springs to mind. Originally, it meant opera's "divine one," a mortal goddess on whom the muse had smiled, blessed with a voice fit for the temples of heaven. If lately the word's definition has strayed far from its original meaning - as stars of ...
Last in line: Africa doesn't rate in U.S. foreign relations
May 01, 2003; ... At the end of 2002, President George W. Bush had a choice to make: go to Africa or prepare to go to war. In December, while trying to distance itself from racist remarks made by then-Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the White House cited the planned trip to Africa as ...
Black Immigrants More Successful Than Black Americans
May 01, 2003; ... Socioeconomics Black people who come to the United States from the Caribbean and Africa earn more money and attain a higher education level than Blacks who were born here (African Americans), according to the report "Black Diversity in Metropolitan America." The report, published by ...
Alive and well
May 01, 2003; ... He traveled by train from Northeast Texas to North Carolina, carrying only a small suitcase, not really knowing what he would see or do. But 39-year-old former slave Andrew Jackson Hurdle, who was sold from his family nearly 30 years earlier, was determined to put the pieces of his life back ...
Nina Simone, soul's high priestess
May 01, 2003; ... APPRECIATION Nina Simone was 10 when she was first hit by the harsh realities of racism. The piano prodigy was giving her first recital at the library in her hometown of Tyron, N.C., in 1943, when her proud parents were ejected from their front row seats and moved to the back to make ...
Milestones
May 01, 2003;
Lives
May 01, 2003; ... Herbert Aptheker, 87, Black history scholar and W.E.B. Du Bois' literary executor, died March 17 in Mountain Home, Calif., after a stroke. He was a resident of San Jose. Clarence Blount, 81, who served 31 years in the Maryland Senate, died of complications from a stroke April 12 in ...
Prison Population Reaches Historic High
May 01, 2003; ... Criminal Justice The nation's prison population has exceeded 2 million, increasing to a record 2,019,234, one of the highest incarceration figures in the world, according to a justice Department Bureau of justice Statistics report. The number of people incarcerated is four times what it ...
Leadership conference on president Bush's Civil Rights record
May 01, 2003; ... QUESTIONS How did the report come about? The report came about as the result of a growing concern from the civil rights community that while President Bush was prosecuting a very high-profile campaign against terrorism, he was at the same time pursuing an equally aggressive ...
Baltimore marine killed on first day of war in Iraq
May 01, 2003; ... The headlines across the country read some variation of "U.S. Identifies Marines Killed in Helicopter Crash." The four Marines, along with eight British military personnel, perished March 20, the first day of the war in Iraq. The servicemen were killed while flying through heavy wind in a ...
Women in the military face increasing opportunity and risk
May 01, 2003; ... When the U.S. Army's 507th Maintenance Company took a wrong turn in Nasiriyah and wound up as prisoners of war, their fate became one of the biggest stories to come out of the war in Iraq. The fact that there were three women among their ranks - Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa of Tuba City, Ariz., Pfc ....
Congress at work
May 01, 2003; ... Although slave labor built the U.S. Capitol, Congress seems unwilling to consider the issue of slavery and its legacy. In 2000, then-Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.) proposed a bill to formally recognize the efforts of Black slaves who erected the brick, sandstone and marble structure where ...
Teen leader prominent in anti-war movement
May 01, 2003; ... Among Native Americans, it is customary to give a child a name thai represents some aspect of her being. If ever a person's name embodied her spirit, Peta Lindsay's does. In the Sioux language, Peta means fire. Recent displays of youth activism - from affirmative action demonstrations to ...
Affirmative action gets its day in court, young organizers rally
May 01, 2003; ... The rain didn't stop nearly 50,000 demonstrators from gathering outside the U.S. Supreme Court April 1. The high court was scheduled to hear arguments in two cases challenging admissions policies at the University of Michigan. The outcome of the cases could strip away one of the final ...
Topeka branch has key sense of history
May 01, 2003; ... After becoming president of the all but defunct Topeka NAACP in 1999, William Richards guided its revitalization with a keen sense of personal and institutional history. "I'm a product of the east Harlem ghetto," says Richards, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "When I was coming up, I ...
Linked fates: Amadou Diallo's mother tells their story
May 01, 2003; ... In February 1999, headlines screamed with the news that Amadou Diallo, 24, was killed by four White undercover New York Police Department officers in a hail of 41 bullets on the doorstep of his Bronx apartment building. As Kadiatou Diallo writes in My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My ...
Ella Baker: An unsung Civil Rights-era legend
May 01, 2003; ... Silk stockings. They were the rage in the early 1920s and the young Black women at Shaw University wanted the school's strict dress code relaxed so they could wear them. They asked Ella Baker to take up their cause. Still a high school senior at Shaw Academy, and not particularly passionate ...
Speaking truth to power in pursuit of civil rights
May 01, 2003; ... Because a rich tradition of eloquence is as nearly inseparable from the American civil rights struggle as its history of bravery, resourcefulness and sacrifice, it would be hard to ruin a project such as this. Josh Gottheimer, a former speech writer for President Bill Clinton and editor of this ...
Live from Baghdad
May 01, 2003; ... A reporter recounts his experience covering the war in Iraq embedded with the U.S. Marine Corps During my time in Iraq, every night felt like the 4th of July in small-town America: the sound of fire works in the distance, the flash of light from an explosion and, on occasion, the ground ...
Some punishments begin after prison
May 01, 2003; ... Imagine for a moment that in a courtroom somewhere in America a woman named Eleanor Wilson has just been convicted of the sale of crack cocaine to an undercover officer. Ms. Wilson's attorney was able to arrange a plea bargain for his client in order to avoid a mandatory five-year prison term, ...
Nation's Newsrooms Continue to Lack Diversity
May 01, 2003; ... Media The majority of the nation's newsrooms do not reflect the diversity of America's communities, according to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). The 26th annual Newsroom Census found that 97 percent of newspapers surveyed, including those in major urban ...
Graduates face an uncertain economy, world
May 01, 2003; ... Since childhood, Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele dreamed of the priesthood, not politics. Deciding whether to answer that call had him at a crossroads. One path would lead the international relations graduate of John Hopkins University to law school and a financially secure future. The other ...
Legal team seeks justice for Greenwood
May 01, 2003; ... John Hope Franklin says he, along with his sister and mother, were "literally sitting on their bags" waiting for his father. Buck Franklin had gone to Tulsa to open a new law office. The family was to join him, but he never made it back to retrieve them. Not that day or the next or the next. It ...
Recasting South Central
May 01, 2003; ... OPINION Only in L.A. would a story about something purely superficial make front page news. But last month The Los Angeles Times reported, as if it carried great weight: city council votes to change the name of South Central to South Los Angeles. The hope, of course, is that such a move ...