Black History Month & J.A. Rogers

January 17, 2009 by cdenis4567

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I certainly can’t let February go by without dedicating one of my commentaries to Black History Month.

The person that stimulated my thirst for Black History was J.A. Rogers, the black historian who died in 1966, but not before writing 16 books. My first J.A. Rogers book was “Africa’s Gift to America.”

Carter G. Woodson, to his credit was the founder of Negro History Week, which evolved into Black History Month. But no one, in my opinion did more to bring black history to the masses, than J.A. Rogers.

W.E.B. Dubois once said about Rogers: “No Man living has revealed so many important facts about the Negro race, as has Rogers.”

So with that said, let me share with bloggers some of the facts that Rogers revealed to me.

For instance, I didn’t know before reading Rogers, “World’s Great Men of Color” that Aesop, of Aesop Fables was African. When I was growing up, the storybooks always portrayed him as white or Greek. But Rogers writes in World’s Great Men of Color, that Aesop’s name is derived from Ethiop. As in Ethiopian, and he was described as having a “flat nose, thick lips, and black skin.”

In Rogers’ “100 Facts About the Negro,” he uncovered the symbol of stability, the Rock of Gibraltar, which was later adopted in 1896 by Prudential Insurance, is named after an African-Moor. His name was Tarik. In 711 A.D when the Moors conquered Spain, Tarik named the mountain Gebel-Tarik, which means Tarik’s Mountain or Gibraltar translated in English.

In Rogers three volume Sex & Race, he discusses how Adolf Hitler copied his racial tactics from America. Rogers quoted Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s number three man, in a 1940, New York Times article defending the notion of racial superiority. Hess was quoted as saying “We are very much like the Ku Klux Klan in America.”.

This is just a sampling of black history facts that Roger’s uncovered, but his legacy isn’t the recitation of facts. What Rogers did for me was stimulate my interest for further investigation; I hope he will do the same for you.

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SUPER BOWL XLI: “POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND” Frederick Douglas

January 17, 2009 by cdenis4567

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Like many in the black community I am beaming with pride as I prepare to watch two black head coaches compete in the Super Bowl for the first time. But with all the excitement around this historic occasion, we all need to huddle for a moment and reflect on how we came to this point in our history.

Regardless of what you might have been told, the Chicago Bears’ Lovie Smith and the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy aren’t in the Super Bowl because of some mystical alignment of the stars.

It’s obvious that hard work, perseverance, talent and a competitive nature brought Dungy and Smith to this point in their careers. However, the dream of coaching in a Super Bowl couldn’t have been realized had they not first been given the opportunity to be NFL assistant coaches.

The opportunities to become head coaches, at least in Smith’s case, are directly the result of the NFL’s diversity policy that began in 2002. But hold the applause for the NFL, because the league didn’t start its diversity policy out of the goodness of its heart. Instead, two very powerful allies of equal employment opportunity demanded the NFL take steps to achieve diversity.

It was the late Johnny Cochran and Cyrus Mehri, a Washington, D.C. attorney who, in 2002, hired economist Dr. Janice Madden of the University of Pennsylvania to do a statistical analysis on the performance of NFL coaches by race.

The report titled: Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities, found that of the five black coaches, Art Shell, Dennis Green, Tony Dungy, Ray Rhodes and Herman Edwards over the prior fifteen years, had a higher winning percentage than their white colleagues. The question before the NFL was this: If black coaches were more successful than white coaches, and hiring decisions are supposedly unbiased, why have there only been five black coaches in the prior fifteen years in the NFL?

With the data to prove discrimination, the NFL was facing a damaging lawsuit, which in football jargon was fourth and long. The NFL rightly decided to punt.

What resulted from the threat of a lawsuit was the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which is named after Dan Rooney, an executive with the Pittsburg Steelers, and chair of the NFL’s Committee on Workplace Diversity. The Rooney rule requires NFL teams with a head coaching vacancy to interview at least one minority candidate.

The moment the NFL released this policy to the press, they received a flurry of criticism by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives who oppose affirmative action and diversity initiatives in corporate America. But to its credit, the NFL stayed the course, and the results are self-evident.

Today the NFL can boast of a successful diversity policy because it has a pipeline of black assistant coaches, many of whom have been hired by black head coaches. Call it Diversity for Dummies, but the NFL figured out that if you give black assistants opportunities to be head coaches, they can in turn hire minority assistants. From that pool of assistants, they can get an opportunity to interview for head coaching opportunities under the Rooney Rule.

All of the black head coaches in the league currently worked under other black head coaches. Tony Dungy was defensive coordinator to former Minnesota Vikings’ head coach Dennis Green. Dungy turned the Vikings into a top-ranked defense, and before the Rooney Rule, received his first head coaching opportunity with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Subsequently Dungy brought in Lovie Smith and Herman Edwards as assistants, so by the time the Rooney Rule became policy, Smith and Edwards were in position to get the opportunity to interview for head coaching jobs. It’s great whether you are black or white to feel a sense of American progress as Dungy and Smith prepare to coach in Super Bowl XLI, but we shouldn’t forget that we arrived here because as Frederick Douglas said “power concedes nothing without a demand.”

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Rudy Giuliani Gets a Pass from the Media

January 17, 2009 by cdenis4567

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One of the most perplexing political developments this early presidential season is the front-runner status of New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, among Republican candidates.

Question: How is it that the media doesn’t raise questions about his lack of experience as they have for Barack Obama?

Giuliani has never been elected to statewide office. His only elective office has been as a two-term mayor of New York. At the very least, the media should be questioning his jump from mayor to leader of the free world.

Giuliani burst onto the national scene after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001. But what I find ironic is that it was Giuliani who created the pre 911 trampling of civil liberties in New York City, before the terrorist attacks; and the architect of a police force where racial profiling of black and brown people seemed to be an accepted police practice.

Under the Giuliani regime, there was an “us” against “them” in the police force which many observers believe led to the hi-profile police brutality cases of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, who was sodomized with a broom stick in 1997 by New York City police officers. And how could we forget the brutal shooting of Amadu Diallo, an African immigrant who was gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets, simply for reaching for his keys to get inside his home.

It’s very curious to me that nobody in the mainstream media is raking up Giuliani’s record in New York City.

And Giuliani is feeling so good about himself right now, he had the audacity to co-author an article with Newt Gingrich titled: Getting Iraq to Work in the Wall Street Journal, where the two of them advocate for a massive jobs program to get Iraqis to work.

They said the White House should take a small percentage of the $100 billion recently approved by Congress, and use it to create an Iraqi Citizen Job Corps, along the lines of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.”

Now, I have an idea, how about pinching off a little bit of that $100 billion to create a jobs program right here in urban America, where black men have peaked at 50 percent unemployment.

Giuliani and Gingrich go on to say: “The goal is to get more Iraqis working, especially young males, who are most susceptible to the terrorist and warlord.”

So my blog questions are: What do you think of Rudy Giuliani becoming president of the United States. And secondly, are we rebuilding Bagdad at the expense of urban America?

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Can Gore Shake up the Democrats?

January 17, 2009 by cdenis4567

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In my continuing coverage of the 2008 presidential race, I want to reveal who I think would be the candidate that would shake up the Democratic Party, and give Democrats the best chance of winning in 2008.

That candidate isn’t Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Kerry, it’s former Vice President Al Gore. Yes, Gore would be the most intriguing presidential candidate if he decided to enter the race, and here’s why.

Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but had to walk away defeated because the election in Florida was stolen from him. I think privately this took a very emotional toll on Gore, but I also think if he were to make a comeback and win; that difficult experience in 2000 would make him a great president. Basically, Gore knows like the rest of us, what its like to get screwed by the system, and that experience I think gives him an advantage over the competition in connecting with voters.

If Gore decides to run, he would instantly be one of the most experienced candidates in the race. And all the political pundits say that voters in 2008 will be looking for candidates that have strong foreign policy credentials because of the blunders that have been made by this white house.

Another reason I want to see Gore run is so he can make amends with black voters. Black folk may forgive, but they don’t forget, and they haven’t forgotten that Al Gore didn’t stand up for them in Florida in 2000 when their votes weren’t counted. Many blacks felt Gore abandoned them when he could have continued fighting for a recount.

And lastly, if Gore were to enter the race and challenge Clinton and Obama if they enter, you would legitimately have three formidable candidates vying for the black vote. And not one of them could safely claim they have the black vote locked up.

Hillary Clinton would try to ride the coattails of her husbands’ popularity among blacks, Obama, has a built-in appeal because he’s black, but clearly doesn’t have black voters locked up, and Gore has appeal because he won 93 percent of the black vote in 2000, more than even Bill Clinton in both his election and reelection.

So my question to readers is this: Do you feel Al Gore abandoned black voters in 2000, and would you consider voting for him in 2008 if he enters the race?

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