Where is the Vision, Where is the Leadership, and Where is the Movement?: The Mutual Failure of the Obama Administration & The American Left

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/white-house-used-bill-clinton-to-ask-sestak-to-drop-out-of-race/?scp=2&sq=Bill Clinton&st=cse


All,

Oh No! This is yet another blatant political disaster for the Obama Administration which is sadly turning out to be one of the most strangely incompetent, inconsistent, and clueless administrations in modern American political history. I've never seen a so-called "liberal reform" administration grovel and consistently act as childishly defensive and petulant about its own policy/strategic positions on issues. It's nothing but rank political cowardice and WEAKNESS on Obama's part and it makes him look very bad. In fact he looks like a LOSER despite the fact that he won more popular votes and a higher percentage of the overall vote than ANY American president since 1984! It's really pathetic. I've never seen a national politician outright SQUANDER as many great opportunities to truly transform and change the direction of the country in practical, concrete terms than Obama. It's astonishing how many clear cut political advantages this man had when he came into office and yet he has WASTED every single one of them! There's NO EXCUSE for it whatsoever. It's certainly not courageous or even mediocre leadership. It's inexcusable FAILURE and not only is Obama and his cowering yet arrogant "we don't play to win, we play not to lose" strategists and advisors like Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Valerie Jarrett responsible but a host of others in the Democratic Party who essentially either advises the President to "do less and avoid taking an independent stand on principle" or simply look away when the President allows his own self serving "caution" and timidity to substitute for bold vision and political/moral courage.

The bottomline is that like MANY progressives throughout the country (and millions of other now thoroughly disillusioned and disappointed young people who fought and voted for him) I am utterly DISGUSTED at the mealy-mouthed direction this presidency is going in as the vicious rightwing wolves and sharks sit back licking their bloody chops waiting to completely take this President and administration apart for good as he caves in and punks out on every major issue facing the American people. I know this all sounds harsh but it's the TRUTH and we all at least need to admit the obvious as we try to turn this way off course ship around before 2012. But until Obama himself learns how to be a REAL LEADER and not simply an opportunist CHUMP always begging for and demanding CONSENSUAL BIPARTISAN SUPPORT AND APPROVAL FROM EVERYBODY (how delusional can the President and his "advisors" be?) and we on the progressive left stop merely whining and petulantly complaining about the Obama administration's abysmal performance and actually begins the hard and crucial work of organizing, educating, and mobilizing millions of U.S, citizens in a national movement to demand political, social, and economic justice and real substantive change across the entire country I'm afraid things are only going to get much worse real soon. Stay tuned...

Kofi


White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race
By PETER BAKER
New York Times


President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary if given a prominent, but unpaid, advisory position, the White House said on Friday.

Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, asked Mr. Clinton last summer to explore “options of service” on a presidential or senior government advisory board with Mr. Sestak, the White House said in a statement. Mr. Sestak said no and went on to win last week’s primary against Senator Arlen Specter.

The White House disputed Republican claims that the conversations might be illegal or improper. “There was no such impropriety,” Robert F. Bauer, the White House counsel, said in a memo released to reporters. “The Democratic Party leadership had a legitimate interest in averting a divisive primary fight and a similarly legitimate concern about the congressman vacating his seat in the House.”

Mr. Bauer went on to say that such horse-trading has been commonplace through history. “There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior administrations – both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals – discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office,” he wrote. “Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements.”

Representative Darrell Issa of California, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the interactions described by the White House “represent an illegal quid pro quo,” even if the position was unpaid. “It is abundantly clear that this kind of conduct is contrary to President Obama’s pledge to change ‘business as usual’ and that his administration has engaged in the kind of political shenanigans he once campaigned to end.”

Federal law makes it a crime for anyone “who directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or any other benefit” to someone else “as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office.” It is also illegal for a government official to use “his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate” for Senate.

While many have speculated that the White House offered to appoint Mr. Sestak as secretary of the Navy, Mr. Bauer said that was never the case. The White House did not offer Mr. Sestak a full-time paid position because Mr. Emanuel wanted him to stay in the House rather than risk losing his seat, so he considered “uncompensated advisory board options.”

The White House did not disclose what those options were, but people briefed on the matter said one option was an appointment to the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of prominent Americans outside government who provide independent oversight of the nation’s spy apparatus and advise the president. But White House officials discovered that it would not work because Mr. Sestak could not serve on the board while still serving in Congress.

In a statement Friday, Mr. Sestak said Mr. Clinton had conveyed Mr. Emanuel’s suggestion that he join a “presidential board” while remaining in the House, but he declined. “I told President Clinton that my only consideration in getting into the Senate race or not was whether it was the right thing to do for Pennsylvania working families and not any offer,” Mr. Sestak said. “The former president said he knew I’d say that, and the conversation moved on to other subjects.”

Mr. Sestak first mentioned publicly in February that he had been offered a job but provided no details, and the White House for three months had refused to discuss it, generating intense criticism from Republicans who accused it of trying to bribe a congressman and deep consternation among Democrats who called on the administration to answer questions.

Mr. Emanuel was eager last summer to clear the way to this year’s Democratic Senate nomination for Mr. Specter, who had just left the Republican party, and to bolster Democrats’ majority in the Senate. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral and two-term House member, was already planning a run.

In tapping Mr. Clinton as the go-between, Mr. Emanuel picked the party’s most prominent figure other than Mr. Obama and someone Mr. Sestak had worked for on the National Security Council in the 1990s. Mr. Sestak endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton against Mr. Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, and Mr. Clinton was one of the first to call to congratulate him on his Senate victory last week.

Mr. Clinton was at the White House on Thursday to have lunch with Mr. Obama and join him in greeting the American men’s World Cup soccer team heading to South Africa.

As chief of staff and previously as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Mr. Emanuel has not been shy about trying to steer party nominations to those he considers the stronger candidates. The White House under Mr. Emanuel has also leaned on Gov. David Paterson of New York to drop out of this year’s gubernatorial race, which he eventually did under a cloud of scandal. Mr. Emanuel’s deputy, Jim Messina, suggested a possible administration job to Andrew Romanoff to get him to not challenge Sen. Michael Bennet in a Colorado primary, The Denver Post has reported, citing unnamed sources.

Whether that constitutes ordinary political horse-trading or crosses a legal line has been debated in Washington for months. Democrats and some Republicans have said it is hardly unusual for presidents to offer political appointments to clear the way for allies. But Republicans have suggested such actions may constitute a crime.

Mr. Issa and all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor. The Justice Department wrote Mr. Issa last week that it did not need a special prosecutor to investigate if it chose to do so. Government officials, who asked not to be identified discussing legal decisions, said that neither the Justice Department nor the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that looks at violations of the Hatch Act governing the political conduct of federal employees, is investigating.

While declining to discuss what happened, Mr. Obama on Thursday said, “I can assure the public that nothing improper took place.”

Michael Barbaro contributed to this post.

The Abject Failures of the Obama Administration and the American Left's sullen complicity in them

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-becker/28905/a-loser-white-house-guilty-by-association

A Loser White House, Guilty by Association
by Robert Becker
May 20, 2010
Smirking Chimp

Long before Year One ended, progressives understood President Obama's focus was routine wheeling and dealing, not regrowing the New Deal. Between victory and governance, Obama "reform" switched from promises to make government serve people to insure government serves business. The result is mounting guilt by association as Obama got himself entrenched only months into power, a speed record for a reform guy, now the establishment president defending every party incumbent. Does this White House think that's the reason it won?

This week's election miscues only reinforce Obama's larger dilemma, once captured perfectly by Naomi Klein, favoring "the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time." As in the gesture tossed off to Diane Sawyer in January, "I'd rather be a really good one-term president," he said, "than a mediocre two-term president." If you can keep backing losers, Mr. President, with a tin ear and tinsmith staff work, you may end up a mediocre one-term president. Your allies, like Arlen Specter, are toast, and Blanche Lincoln teeters on the edge, a likely run-off loser.

Nor did many on the left imagine the Democratic Party would abandon its "play it safe, don't rock the boat" game plan. In retrospect, candidate Obama's "anti-war" credentials (vs. the "hawkish Hillary) look thin, like wishful thinking driven by spin: we're still waist deep in the big muddy. Ditto with business subsidies, repairing Constitutional violations, or systemic energy reform - no easy task when Obama touts ethanol, offshore drilling, and nuclear power. Yet, who imagined this "Anti-Bush" candidate, as Michael D. Green put it, would qualify in office as "one of the most conservative presidents of the last century."

Incompetence Inheritable, too

Yes, serious disasters came with the office, as my defensive Obama friends repeat, but how does that explain enduring White House incompetence - at times merging the worst of Bush's cockiness and fortress insularity with Pollyannish myopia. It's like Rose-colored, Rahm Emanuel Blue-Dogism dominates all tactics - and remember, Rahm came on board well AFTER a brilliant campaign ran its course.

So, excuse me, but I don't see how Obama defenders can explain away second-class performance, as distinct from strategy errors, say, over health insurance reform - the message, the timing, the compromises and the missed educational opportunities are now classic "what not to do" models. Puzzling indeed is how Obama's team 1) totally missed the Mass. senate fiasco, 2) weakly backed two losing governors' campaigns, and 3) now goes down in flames, as if White House endorsement is the kiss of death for vulnerable two senate incumbents.

Not only did Obama misread the Joe Sestek revolt, but stumbled trying to buy him off, despite Specter's utter weakness in the primary and vs. the Republican challenger. What made Rahm's White House imagine the aged, unhealthy, unprincipled Specter had any remaining constituency, having offended conservatives, independents and Democrats.

One senses, just as its campaign promises were so many words, this administration took the challenge of governance with the same wing and a prayer. Forget the policy disagreements and disappointments: despite fine speeches and being unsullied by scandal, Obama has offended millions of his most fervent supporters, with nothing progressive to show for it - PLUS infuriated the right, PLUS alienated the center. Now, that trifecta takes some doing by a politician dying to please everyone.

Like Bush, Unlike Bush

Reluctant to compromise, Bush drove away the center but never his base support, despite abandoning abortion, its most fervent issue. For six years, Bush-Cheney mastered political procedure, passing its key agenda (all but privatizing Social Security). However limited and unprepared, W. agreed to advisers, strategies and allies who made him appear a winner, garnering all the wars money can buy, concentrating executive power, abuse of law and agencies, wholesale deregulation and regressive, and budget-busting tax cuts for the rich.

For many, Obama peaked around inauguration, and my savvy Hyde Park, Chicago observer has given up, "Obama would lose in 2012 if the Republicans didn't have to name their candidate." Absolutely right: if Obama had to run only on his under-achievements, he's be underwater to any decent opponent. His main ploy will parlay his upbeat personality while targeting the designated rightwinger as a scary dinosaur who favors the rich, the banksters, and extremists keen still to privatize Social Security. Of course, in 2012, one can't count on a senile opponent self-destructing or another Sarah Palin outlier selection.

Nor do I question, echoing Professor Green, what Obama shares with Elena Kagan: well-protective covering, high ambition, and a deficiency of principles, both "bloodless careerists." But set Obama against a vacuous demagogue, like Palin, even more transparently ruthless, incompetent and unstable - and Obama gets a second term. However remote, painfully on display day after day as the Gulf get badly contaminated, Obama calm plays better than foaming-at-the-mouth Republicans coming across as predatory and blood-thirsty. Compared to an open-mouthed shark, a chicken hawk is reassuring. And Obama will still be a war president with Pentagon support, and who wants to switch chicken hawks in the middle of such endless streams.

Incompetence did in Bush

Recall what reduced Bush wasn't a repulsive ideology but massive incompetence, dismissing the tragedy of drown citizens swept off rooftops, even if poor and black. Two botched wars, atop incredibly deceptive explanations, ultimately defined a major league loser, here and overseas. Unrestrained by Congress, Bush extremists overplayed their hand, with Cheney alternating between from Darth Vader and Chicken Little, a curious mix. Whatever his flaws, Joe Biden is "likeable enough," though Obama would do well to find a more strategic V.P. choice the second time around.

Americans, above all, want to identify with winners, and Obama's dramatic election, persistent legislative wins and overseas gestures, however modest the results, will keep his popularity from hard descent. But misreading political earthquakes, or merely associating with Specter, is contaminating a cock-sure White House, screw ups and all. Like Bush's the Obama crew appears not to learn from failure. Passing unpopular bills is one thing but consistently offending your base and the center is even more serious. Note how Palin keenly avoids seeming the loser, blaming McCain's blunders, then quitting a bad scene rather than "lose." She's happily getting rich, running for nothing, the party's unelected prom queen.

So, as long as Obama has a real, readily attackable rightwing opponent in 2012 - and no major scandals or monumental failures occur, even a compromised, establishment president is re-electable. This week's election, especially with Dems holding John Murtha's seat, suggest no Midterm deluge. The cat-like Obama only has so many lives, yet Rahm's operatives keep backing losers, bad can go to worse. Political misgivings, even downright disappointments, are like oil leaking in the Gulf: what matters isn't how they got started but how long the disasters last and what tar balls stick to what shores. Even the Obama smile, his great asset, will fade, like the Cheshire cat, if people increasingly conclude there's no there there.


http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/19/whats-wrong-with-the-financial-reform-bill/

MATT TAIBBI
TAIBBLOG
Apr. 19 2010

What’s Wrong with the Financial Reform Bill

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd’s financial “reform” proposal (Barney Frank’s wasn’t much better) won’t change the nature of anything Wall Street does. Dodd’s needless watering down of a proposal to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency has been well-documented, so here is a list of 10 other problems Dodd’s bill will not fix:

via Speculating Banks Still Rule — Ten Ways Dems and Dodd Are Failing on Financial Reform | Economy | AlterNet.

Friend Nomi Prins, who in a former life worked for Goldman, this weekend sent along a link to an article in which she outlines the gaps in the current version of the financial regulatory reform bill. Given that the bill is sometimes being pitched as the answer to some of the problems underlined by the Goldman case, it’s a very sobering read.

My favorite is the halting, incomplete attempt at a rollback of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, i.e. the pseudo-restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act known as the Volcker rule. Nomi writes:

2) It won’t reduce the economic danger from rampant, overleveraged trading activities. The bill would restrict certain banks from having proprietary trading operations (trading with their own capital) under the “Volcker rule,” but it’s full of problematic exemptions:

a) Banks that claim they trade on behalf of their customers (which they all say they do) escape the rule.

b) Banks that trade for “market-making” purposes (i.e. Goldman Sachs betting against its own clients) are home-free.

c) Banks aren’t required to itemize their trading operations to regulators, so they get to decide what they consider trading for their customers and what they consider proprietary. I wonder how that will work out.

Then of course there’s the treatment of hedge funds, also relevant given the business with John Paulson:

5) It won’t contain the risk to the shadow banking system from hedge funds, private equity firms and venture capital funds. Venture capital and private equity advisers still won’t have to register or report to the SEC, though hedge funds with over $100 million in assets will. There’s also no statutory definition of what actually constitutes a hedge fund, and the bill doesn’t close the tax loophole that allows fund managers to be taxed at the lower capital-gains tax rate of 15 percent, rather than the higher income tax rate of 34 percent. If it sounds crazy to you that the richest people in America are being taxed at the lowest rates, it is: the loophole cost taxpayers about $5 billion this year alone.

There is some good stuff in the bill, but it is riddled with loopholes. Far more important than the actual bill is the effort to actually enforce existing laws. While it is true that the near-complete absence of a regulatory structure to oversee derivatives trading is problematic, there is a lot the government could have done still, if it had wanted to, to prevent catastrophes like AIG and Lehman Brothers.

A Tribute to Malcolm X on His 85th Birthday

Malcolm X: 1925-1965

All, 

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on this day in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925 and was assassinated at the age of 39 on February 21, 1965 in New York's Harlem. In between those two events Malcolm lived one of the most complex, profound, dynamic, and iconic lives of the 20th century and had--as he continues to have--a tremendous impact and influence on millions of people throughout not only the United States but the entire globe. How he managed to accomplish this massive feat despite the severe and pervasive racist oppression and exploitation inflicted upon all African Americans of his generation-- and the decided lack of official social, economic, and cultural status especially accorded those like Malcolm who fiercely organized masses of people to oppose and resist such treatment--is one of the major accomplishments of modern African American history and marks Malcolm's revolutionary contributions to global political, spiritual, and cultural thought and activism as one of the most important and powerful legacies of any individual in the world during the 20th century. In my view Malcolm remains the most intellectually and socially significant, advanced, and innovative African American political leader since W.E.B. DuBois because he represented and embodied not only a deep, analytical understanding and insight into the myriad dialectical complexities and contradictions of African American life and culture, but he also understood and expressed in a particularly nuanced and organic manner just how the specific ideological and cultural dynamics of race and class in the United States affected the tone and identity of national liberation struggles both here and abroad. In addition Malcolm's deeply rooted disaporic connections to international Third World and Pan African movements in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of European and American hegemony over Africa, Latin America, and Asia--and the pervasive revolutionary anticolonial struggles against such domination and control in these societies--played a major role in also making Malcolm one of the leading global activists on behalf of anti- imperialist movements.In 2002 I published a historical and political biography on Malcolm entitled 'The Life and Work of Malcolm X.' What follows below is the introduction to that text. Further information and texts by and about Malcolm as well as videos of him speaking will also be featured. It is in the spirit of great love and solidarity that we make these gestures in celebration of Malcolm's 85th birthday. May his extraordinary work and stellar personal example continue to lead and inspire us all.

Kofi

THE TRUE GENIUS OF MALCOLM X
by Kofi Natambu

“I know that societies have often killed the people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America--then, all the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine."
                       --The Autobiography of Malcolm X
                         (as told to Alex Haley), 1965

“It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”
                      --Malcolm X
                        Barnard College, February 18, 1965

We live in an age of profound dishonesty, fear, hatred and timid equivocation. A dangerously facile cynicism, coupled with a soul-numbing infantilism has infected our society, rendering us seemingly powerless to productively affect or direct our lives. Too often ignorance and a smug reliance on easy orthodoxies of all kinds lend an illusory quality to our collective despair, lost as we often are on the beaches of loneliness and indecision. What’s worse is that so many of our so-called “leaders” lack any genuine intellectual, political, or moral energy to propose directions, methods, and ideas that require much more than adolescent posturing or punitive edicts. Opportunism and careerism rule the day, informed as they are by the insipid “pay me” principle, which ensures that ‘incidental’ things like integrity, discipline, compassion, generosity, and intelligence--the kind that gives one the opportunity to think, reflect, and act instead of foreclosing those possibilities—won’t inform and provide ballast for our insights and desires.Which brings me to Malcolm X, also known as Malcolm Little, ‘Detroit Red’, ‘Satan’ and finally, El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. The black man with many names, green eyes and red hair who didn’t live to see the age of forty but who lived a multitude of lives anyway. The black man from Omaha, Lansing, Detroit, Boston, and New York who lived to befriend, work with, inspire, confound, educate, learn from, and transform people and cultures and political and economic and cultural and religious systems and values on three continents, and who lived to tell his/their/our stories. The black man who spoke a bewildering number of languages from African American swing, bebop, and blues tonalities, in all of their ultra hip vernacular modes and dimensions to the mellifluously flowing nuances & inflections of Arabic, Creole, Yoruba, and Chinese stews fermenting with the ancient elixirs of their myriad linguistic, spiritual, and cultural traditions.You see, Malcolm sought at all times and under every conceivable circumstance to know, and so knowledge returned the favor. Knowledge, whose handmaiden is faith, is something Malcolm “knew” well because experience was valuable to him, and he never took what it could reveal to him for granted. Even in the ugly basement of his own temporary confusions and stupidities, frustrations and disappointments, Malcolm always sought to know, to “truly understand and examine” that which he had been told was (or was not) “real.” He wasn’t content to find an easy niche and lie there, swatting flies and muttering everyday homilies. He understood, which is to say, appreciated the effort, time, and commitment that it took to “know” and “understand” anything, anyone, anywhere. He wanted always, to know more, and think more, and express more, and give more, and create more and expect more, and feel more, and experience more. It wasn’t enough for him to merely embrace an idea, action, or stance. He “knew” better. He had been taught by everyone and everything he had ever encountered to always critically question what he was “being told.” Not in order to checkmate some hapless opponent ‘Homer Simpson’ style, but to ask, endlessly and creatively, and forcefully, and quietly and loudly and gently and brusquely ASK not merely who, what, when, where, and how, but the “heavy duty” WHY(?)Malcolm realized it would always take more than he was able or willing to give but he freely gave anyway, knowing that his ego or his pain or his ignorance or his fear would be inadequate. But because he gave, and believed in giving, and knew the limitations of fame, money, “suckcess,” and “identity” he was able, always, to supplant his former achievements and establish, build, work for, and embody still higher and different accomplishments. Malcolm wasn’t ‘hemmed in’ by politics or religion or ideology. He understood that in order to “live what you teach” and aspire to learning more required that one become a student of life. What made Malcolm so important is that he never lost faith in his ability to change, and be changed by, the world. But not merely the world we inherit but the world(s) we make and change and know and then (re)make again and again. Malcolm represented what Amilcar Cabral, the West African revolutionary meant when he said “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” He also knew why Frantz Fanon added “Every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” And oh yeah, this one: “To whom much is given, much is expected.” Malcolm also knew that what is “true” is not necessarily “real” or vice versa. No “virtual realities” for him. No ‘Survivor’-induced lies from the jungles of corporate gangsters & advertising executive suites for him. Only the “true” and the “real” in an exquisitely dialectical and yes yall, dialogical dance would ever suffice for Malcolm X, the known, but unknown one. As Miles Davis once said “Hate is like Love--they both build momentum.” The ‘X’ in Malcolm’s life was the algebra of possibilities to know and then gradually, inevitably “not know” so that knowledge and activity could find some new and fresh ways to connect and reconnect, combine and recombine in finally more useful and interesting ways. The ‘X’ is the African American in the diaspora finding his/her way “back home” to the selves that were always already “black” and will be again and again no matter what ‘colors’ we’re compelled to be. That, for Malcolm and his ‘X’ is what made it possible for him to insist on the eternally real and true core of the matter, which was and is and always will be our ‘Human Rights’, our Human Being Hood. He didn’t mean this in any pollyanna, namby-pamby, let’s-all hold-hands-and pretend-we’re-all-the-same-suckers-singing-songs-together manner either. No. His aim was simultaneously much higher and deeper than that. ‘Freedom is for the Free’. Which is to say, for those willing to pay the price. The price is always our very lives as in “You know the stakes is high.” Malcolm told us over and over again. And no man or woman can possibly give or take that freedom--unless we “allow” them to.That is the TRUE genius of Malcolm X. He realized the sheer simplicity, which is to say, bone-crushing difficulty of what it means to be a “genius” and share that great capacity for love, thought, and action with the world/whirl. Malcolm looked & saw that genius is not something we are but something we do. That is his profound legacy to “his people” which is finally anyone who “really & truly” wants to be free & is more than willing to “pay the price.” The last words of his Autobiography quoted at the start of this soliloquy remind us so eloquently of his actual legacy to those of us who are not afraid to make a contribution to not merely the ‘concept’ of liberation, but the living, breathing necessity of it. That’s real & true...like Malcolm himself. This book is an attempt to recognize and express that fact.

Kofi Natambu
May 23, 2001
Oakland, California

http://www.malcolmxonline.com/malcolm-x-videos.html
















MALCOLM X QUOTATIONS:Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.

I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.

If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.

If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.

In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.

Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965


Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS BY AND ABOUT MALCOLM XCarson, Clayborne (1991). Malcolm X: The FBI File. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-88184-758-5.
Clarke, John Henrik, ed. (1990) [1969]. Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. ISBN 0-86543-201-5.
Clegg III, Claude Andrew (1997). An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-18153-1.
Cone, James H. (1991). Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. ISBN 0-88344-721-5.
DeCaro, Jr., Louis A. (1996). On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-1864-7.
Dyson, Michael Eric (1995). Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509235-X.
Evanzz, Karl (1992). The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-049-6.
Helfer, Andrew; Randy DuBurke (2006). Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-9504-1.
Karim, Benjamin (1992). Remembering Malcolm. with Peter Skutches and David Gallen. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-88184-881-6.
Kondo, Zak A. (1993). Conspiracys: Unravelling the Assassination of Malcolm X. Washington, D.C.: Nubia Press. ISBN 0-9618815-1-13.
Lincoln, C. Eric (1961). The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press. OCLC 422580.
Lomax, Louis E. (1987) [1968]. To Kill a Black Man. Los Angeles: Holloway House. ISBN 0-87067-731-4.
Lomax, Louis E. (1963). When the Word Is Given. Cleveland: World Publishing. OCLC 1071204.
Malcolm X (1992) [1965]. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. with the assistance of Alex Haley. New York: One World. ISBN 0-345-37671-4.
Malcolm X (1989) [1970]. By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X. George Breitman, ed. New York: Pathfinder Press. ISBN 0-87348-150-X.
Malcolm X (1989) [1971]. The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X. Benjamin Karim, ed. New York: Arcade. ISBN 1-55970-006-8.
Malcolm X (1990) [1965]. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. George Breitman, ed. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. ISBN 0-8021-3213-8.
Malcolm X (1991) [1968]. The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard. Archie Epps, ed. New York: Paragon House. ISBN 1-55778-479-5.
Marable, Manning (2009). "Rediscovering Malcolm's Life: A Historian's Adventures in Living History". in Marable, Manning; Aidi, Hishaam D. Black Routes to Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-8400-X.
Natambu, Kofi (2002). The Life and Work of Malcolm X. Indianapolis: Alpha Books. ISBN 0-02-864218-X.
Perry, Bruce (1991). Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill. ISBN 0-88268-103-6.
Rickford, Russell J. (2003). Betty Shabazz: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks. ISBN 1-4022-0171-0.
Sales, William W. (1994). From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-480-9.
Terrill, Robert (2004). Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment. Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press. ISBN 0-87013-730-1.
Further reading

Alkalimat, Abdul. Malcolm X for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers, 1990.
Asante, Molefi K. Malcolm X as Cultural Hero: and Other Afrocentric Essays. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993.
Baldwin, James. One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based On Alex Haley's "The Autobiography Of Malcolm X". New York: Dell, 1992.
Breitman, George. The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967.
Breitman, George, and Herman Porter. The Assassination of Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976.
Carew, Jan. Ghosts In Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1994.
Cleage, Albert B., and George Breitman. Myths About Malcolm X: Two Views. New York: Merit, 1968.
Collins, Rodney P. The Seventh Child. New York: Dafina; London: Turnaround, 2002.
Davis, Thulani. Malcolm X: The Great Photographs. New York: Stewart, Tabon and Chang, 1992.
DeCaro, Louis A. Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity. New York: New York University, 1998.
Doctor, Bernard Aquina. Malcolm X for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers, 1992.
Friedly, Michael. The Assassination of Malcolm X. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992.
Gallen, David, ed. Malcolm A to Z: The Man and His Ideas. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992.
Gallen, David, ed. Malcolm X: As They Knew Him. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992.
Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Jamal, Hakim A. From The Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me. New York: Random House, 1972.
Jenkins, Robert L. The Malcolm X Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Kly, Yussuf Naim, ed. The Black Book: The True Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz). Atlanta: Clarity Press, 1986.
Leader, Edward Roland. Understanding Malcolm X: The Controversial Changes in His Political Philosophy. New York: Vantage Press, 1993.
Lee, Spike, with Ralph Wiley. By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of The Making Of Malcolm X. New York: Hyperion, 1992.
Maglangbayan, Shawna. Garvey, Lumumba, and Malcolm: National-Separatists. Chicago, Third World Press 1972.
Marable, Manning. On Malcolm X: His Message & Meaning. Westfield, N.J.: Open Media, 1992.
Shabazz, Ilyasah. Growing Up X. New York: One World, 2002.
Strickland, William et al.. Malcolm X: Make It Plain. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Terrill, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
T'Shaka, Oba. The Political Legacy of Malcolm X. Richmond, Calif.: Pan Afrikan Publications, 1983.
Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution. London: Free Association Books, 1989.
Wood, Joe, ed. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

External links

The Official Web Site of Malcolm X Malcolm X: Make It Plain malcolm-x.orgMalcolm X: A Profile The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University Malcolm X Reference Archive Malcolm X: A Research Site
Interviews
Interview with Louis Lomax, from When the Word Is Given (1963) Interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark, Spring 1963
Video interview with Herman Blake,
October 1963 Interview with A.B. Spellman, May 1964
CBC television interview, January 1965
Speeches
"By Any Means Necessary", June 1964 (Video) Other links Malcolm X's FBI file

MORE LINKS:

http://www.malcolmx.com/
http://www.brothermalcolm.net/

http://www.malcolmxonline.com/malcolm-x-videos.html

Elena Kagan, President Obama, and the Dire Necessity of Integrity and Vision on the Supreme Court

Washington -- President Barack Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, saying she will demonstrate independence, integrity and passion for the law.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will become the third woman on the high court. Obama introduced her today in the White House's East Room. He called her "my friend" and one of the nation's foremost legal minds.

The selection of Kagan came after nearly a monthlong process of consideration. Obama always had Kagan on his short list but still considered a broader group of candidates, interviewing four.

The president informed Kagan that she would a Supreme Court nominee on Sunday night. He then called the three federal judges he did not choose for the position, Diane Wood, Merrick Garland and Sidney Thomas.

Never a judge, Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. She was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, first woman to serve as the top Supreme Court lawyer for any administration, and now first in Obama's mind to succeed legendary liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

At 50 years old, Kagan would be the youngest justice on the court, which would give her the opportunity to extend Obama's legacy for a generation.

Kagan must first win Senate confirmation. A source close to the selection process said a central element in Obama's choice was Kagan's reputation for bringing together people of competing views and earning their respect.

Republicans have shown no signs in advance that they would try to prevent a vote on Kagan, but they are certain to grill her in confirmation hearings over her experience, her thin record of legal writings and her objections to the military's policy about gays.
When she was confirmed as solicitor general in 2009, seven Republicans backed her: Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Susan Collins of Maine, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

Kagan came to the fore as a candidate who had worked closely with all three branches of government, a legal mind with both a sense of modesty and sense of humor. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss factors that led to Kagan's impending nomination.

Kagan has clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked for Bill Clinton and earned a stellar reputation as a student, teacher and manager of the elite academic world. Her standing has risen in Obama's eyes as his government's lawyer before the high court over the last year.

Yet Kagan would be the first justice without judicial experience in almost 40 years. The last two were William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell Jr., both of whom joined the court in 1972.

All of the three other finalists she beat out for the job are federal appeals court judges, and all nine of the current justices served on the federal bench before being elevated.
Kagan's fate will be up to a Senate dominated by Democrats, who with 59 votes have more than enough to confirm her, even though they are one shy of being able to halt any Republican stalling effort.

For the second straight summer, the nation can expected an intense Supreme Court confirmation debate even though, barring a surprise, Kagan is likely to emerge as a justice.

Supreme Court justices wield enormous power over the daily life of Americans. Any one of them can cast the deciding vote on matters of life and death, individual freedoms and government power. Presidents serve four-year terms; justices have tenure for life.

Democrats went 15 years without a Supreme Court appointment until Obama chose federal appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor last year to succeed retiring Justice David Souter. Just 16 months in office, Obama has a second opportunity with Kagan, under different circumstances.

Obama's decision last year centered much on the compelling narrative of Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, who grew up in a housing project and overcame hardship.

This year, Obama particularly wanted someone who could provide leadership and help sway fellow justices toward a majority opinion. The president has grown vocal in his concern that the conservative-tilting court is giving too little voice to average people.

Kagan is known for having won over liberal and conservative faculty at the difficult-to-unite Harvard Law School, where she served as dean for nearly six years.

Her background, including time as a lawyer and a key domestic policy aide in President Clinton's White House, would give the court a different perspective.

The White House is expected to frame Kagan's lack of service as a judge in upbeat terms, underscoring that there are many qualified routes to the top of the judiciary.

Kagan, who is unmarried, was born in New York City. She holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton, a master's degree from Oxford and a law degree from Harvard.

She served as a Supreme Court clerk for one of her legal heroes, Justice Thurgood Marshall. And before that, she clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner Mikva, who later became an important political mentor to Obama in Chicago.

Kagan and Obama both taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1990s.

In her current job, Kagan represents the U.S. government and defends acts of Congress before the Supreme Court and decides when to appeal lower court rulings.
Kagan has the high task of following Stevens, who leaves a legacy that includes the preservation of abortion rights, protection of consumer rights and limits on the death penalty and executive power. He used his seniority and his smarts to form majority votes.

Rick Garnett, a professor of law and associate dean of University of Notre Dame Law School, voiced the concern of many conservatives.

"Future elections might undo some of the president's policies, but his more liberal views about the Constitution, the powers of the national government, and the role of unelected federal judges, are now being locked in securely," Garnett said in a statement.

Kagan would be the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following current Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

She would be the third Jewish justice along with six Catholics. With Stevens' retirement, the court will have no Protestants, the most prevalent denomination in the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/politics/14diversity.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1

All,

Whoa folks...WAIT a damn minute here...let me get this straight: Does Obama and the African American supporters of Ms. Kagan who "just happen to be" some of the President's oldest black friends and colleagues at Harvard Law School (like Professor Charles Ogletree who taught Obama at the Law School during his time there as a student in the late 1980s) really, seriously think that they can get away with their strong and emphatic endorsements of Kagan's clearly abysmal record of hiring African American law professors for tenured positions at Harvard Law just because the President likes her and she too is a longtime friend and colleague of his? This position is absolutely bogus and quite absurd on its face. Kagan is on record of hiring ZERO African Americans (as well as Latinos) while Dean of Harvard Law School during her tenure there out of 32(!) positions. Nor did she hire any blacks of Latinos in her position of Solicitor General which she was selected for by Obama last year. NONE, NADA, ZILCH..C'mon! Let's get real--these numbers are atrocious and frankly indefensible. The President, his black cronies and associates at the Law School, and others who support her in her nomination for the Supreme court must be JOKING if they actually think this record is in any way acceptable. What kind of ludicrous standard for "diversity" is this? If a Republican or southern democratic nominee had this kind of insulting record of (not) hiring African Americans and Latinos at Harvard Law would we give that person a pass the way that the President and her personal friends are asking/demanding that we do on Kagan's behalf? Would this record be considered OK and worthy of support by Professors Ogletree and Kennedy? OF COURSE NOT! In fact they and Obama would be the first to publicly and quite justifiably raise very serious questions and objections if this were the case. So let's not play stupid little games here and give Ms. Kagan, the President, and their supporters at Harvard Law School a pass for pretending that this is fine just because the President is her personal friend...Nah... No way! That would not only be intellectually and morally dishonest but very irresponsible to say the least. Ms. Kagan and the President must be held publicly accountable for this serious problem and critical questions should and must be raised about this with regard to her general nomination, Merely refusing an endowed chair tainted with the blood money of slavery and taking one instead with the great Charles Hamilton Houston's name on it (the legendary Houston was Thurgood Marshall's mentor at Howard University and in his general legal career during the the 1930s and '40s) is simply not enough by a long shot.. Like both Houston and Marshall did during their extraordinary careers as courageous and stalwart legal protectors of social and economic justice Ms. Kagan AND President Obama must PUT UP OR SHUT UP on these crucial matters of genuine public diversity and equal employment opportunities for African Americans and Latinos in our higher education institutions and professions. In other words: NO ONE GETS A PASS ON THAT-- not even the President and a Supreme Court nominee. The ball (and the fate of the Supreme Court) is now in their hands...I sincerely hope they don't blow it...

Kofi



Nominee Scrutinized for Hiring on Race

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
May 13, 2010
New York Times

BOSTON — When Elena Kagan became dean of Harvard Law School in 2003, she could have taken the endowed chair named for Isaac Royall Jr. The Royall family had donated more than 2,100 acres to Harvard in the 1700s, but the family had earned its fortune on the backs of the slave trade.

Ms. Kagan declined to take the Royall professorship. Instead, she chose a new chair in the name of Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review and a crusader against Jim Crow laws.

Ms. Kagan’s history on race issues at Harvard has come under scrutiny since President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court on Monday. Critics say that she did not create enough racial diversity at Harvard, and that in the absence of any writings or opinions, her hiring practices serve as a clue to her thinking. Her supporters counter that she demonstrated a commitment to equality; her claiming the chair in the name of Mr. Houston, they said, is but one example.

In the nearly six years that Ms. Kagan was dean, from 2003 to 2009, she hired a total of 43 permanent, full-time faculty members, 32 of whom were tenured and tenured-track. Of those, 25 were white men, 6 were white women and one was an Asian-American woman. Of the other 11, 6 were white men, 2 were women and 3 were minority men (2 black and one Indian), according to a law school official.

Law school officials said the numbers did not reflect the whole story because offers were made to other minority and women scholars; some were declined and some still open. But others said the record spoke for itself.

“Kagan’s performance as dean at Harvard raises doubts about her commitment to equality for traditionally disadvantaged groups,” Guy-Uriel Charles, a black law professor at Duke, wrote last month in an oft-cited post.

During roughly the same period that Ms. Kagan was at Harvard, Mr. Charles wrote, Yale Law School hired just 10 faculty members; 5 were women, and only one was a minority.

Ms. Kagan’s track record on diversity improved during the last year when she became solicitor general. In that office, she has hired six people — three women and three men (one white, one Asian and one Indian).

Lester K. Spence, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on theroot.com, a Web site devoted to black issues, that Ms. Kagan appeared to be more concerned with ideological diversity than with diversity of race or gender.

“President Obama wants us to support his choice not because she’s got a strong record, not even because she has a particularly visible record, but because he knows her,” Mr. Spence wrote. “I’m not buying it,” he added. “And even if Kagan ends up being the best justice this side of Thurgood Marshall, you shouldn’t either.”

After it was clear that Mr. Obama, the first black president, would nominate Ms. Kagan, several black women wrote to him saying they were disappointed that he had not nominated a black woman.

The women, who included Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, also said they wanted to learn more about Ms. Kagan’s record on civil rights.

The administration has been pushing back against any suggestion that Ms. Kagan has been insensitive on racial matters, as have some of her black supporters.

Ronald S. Sullivan, a black law professor whom Ms. Kagan recruited to Harvard, wrote on thegrio.com, another site devoted to black issues, that “no elite law school has done enough” with respect to minority hiring. But, he noted, her spurning of the Royall chair “was a significant statement made by the dean of one of the nation’s top law schools.“

And, he said, Ms. Kagan had expanded the clinical teaching program at Harvard so that “thousands of indigent and under-represented citizens received quality legal services that they otherwise would not have been able to afford.”

Randall L. Kennedy, another black professor at Harvard Law, also strongly defended Ms. Kagan’s hiring practices. He said in an article in The Huffington Post that no dean was solely responsible for hiring faculty, with each one requiring a majority if not a supermajority of votes. This, he said, gets to be a complicated proposition.

Still, he said, Ms. Kagan supported programs that have helped advance minorities, and she helped form a committee to identify promising racial minority candidates.

While she was dean, an average of about 30 percent of the entering classes were minorities, up from about 25 percent in the previous six years, according to a Harvard official.

One of Ms. Kagan’s strongest backers has been Charles J. Ogletree Jr., perhaps the most prominent black law professor at Harvard. He has noted in interviews and articles that she has been supportive of men and women of color among both students and faculty.

“If you look at her whole record, ” Mr. Ogletree said in an interview on Thursday with Essence.com, “I think it tells you that she worked diligently to make opportunities available for others. The questions about who she recommended and who was tenured are fair, and I think she’ll be able to respond to them.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/us/politics/13marshall.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1


Kagan’s Link to Marshall Cuts 2 Ways

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 12, 2010
New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 1988, Justice Thurgood Marshall assigned a clerk, Elena Kagan, to write a first draft of his opinion in a case considering whether a school district could charge a poor family for busing a child to the nearest school, which was 16 miles away.

















Associated Press

Thurgood Marshall at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1967. Elena Kagan clerked for him 20 years later

A majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the busing fee was constitutional. Justice Marshall, who was 80, was incensed and wanted a fiery dissent. But the 28-year-old Ms. Kagan, now a Supreme Court nominee, thought her boss’s legal analysis was wrong.

Ms. Kagan, recalling the incident in a 1993 tribute after his death, wrote that after she told him that “it would be difficult to find in favor of the child” under legal doctrine, he called her a “knucklehead.” He “returned to me successive drafts of the dissenting opinion for failing to express — or for failing to express in a properly pungent tone — his understanding of the case,” she wrote.

Because Ms. Kagan has never been a judge and has produced only a handful of scholarly writings, clues to her philosophy are rare. In that vacuum, liberals and conservatives alike are attributing special significance to her clerkship year with Justice Marshall, who led the civil rights movement’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation before becoming a particularly liberal Supreme Court justice.

But while Ms. Kagan, a former board member for the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, clearly relished the experience and admired the justice as a historic figure, she appears to have had a far more ambivalent attitude toward his jurisprudence, according to a review of his papers at the Library of Congress, her comments over the years about him and interviews with her fellow clerks and colleagues.

In analyzing why Justice Marshall was adamant about siding with the poor family in the busing fee case, for example, Ms. Kagan explained in her tribute that he “allowed his personal experiences, and the knowledge of suffering and deprivation gained from those experiences, to guide him.”

But Ms. Kagan did not share those experiences, notes Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who heads an institute named after Justice Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, and who has talked over the years with Ms. Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean, about her clerkship.

“It’s absurd to compare Elena Kagan’s judicial philosophy to Thurgood Marshall’s philosophy,” Professor Ogletree said. “Their times and life experiences are different. They lived in different worlds. The reality is that Elena Kagan learned a lot from Justice Marshall, but she will not be overly influenced by Marshall or anyone else. She is her own person.”

Some differences in the views of Justice Marshall — who once described his legal philosophy as, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up” — and of his former clerk are striking. For example, he believed that the death penalty was always unconstitutional. But during the confirmation process when she was named solicitor general last year, Ms. Kagan said she had no quarrel with the death penalty.

“I am not morally opposed to capital punishment,” Ms. Kagan wrote to a senator, adding that she “accepted” the Supreme Court’s precedents upholding “the death penalty as constitutional in a wide variety of cases and circumstances.”

Nevertheless, the political dynamics of Ms. Kagan’s nomination have led figures on the left and the right to gloss over such differences.

After some liberal commentators questioned whether Ms. Kagan could be trusted, President Obama declared that Justice Marshall’s “understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena’s career.”

Conservative critics, too, have sought to link Ms. Kagan closely to Justice Marshall. Among them, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice has decried a supposed “Kagan/Marshall judicial philosophy,” noting that in her tribute she described as a “thing of glory” her former boss’s view that courts should show special solicitude for disadvantaged parties.

By 1987, as the Rehnquist court was moving to the right, Justice Marshall was “in his decline and alienated, marginalized” and, in hiring clerks like Ms. Kagan, “looking for really bright people to kind of put a new charge in him” and to help him write dissents, said Juan Williams, a Marshall biographer.

“She didn’t come to him because she was necessarily of like mind, although she was coming out of the same political milieu,” Mr. Williams said.

Justice Marshall nicknamed Ms. Kagan “Shorty” and sometimes referred to her as “Little Bits,” though they all got called “knucklehead” from time to time, recalled Harry Litman, another clerk that year. The musty chambers were crammed with books, African artifacts, red Naugahyde chairs and ungainly desks.

Justice Marshall did a lot of work in an anteroom to his main office. There, he sat in a comfortable chair across a large table from his clerks to discuss cases, sessions that inevitably digressed into stories the justice would tell about his life.

“You’re at the same time laughing because he’s such a great raconteur and also thinking it’s unbelievable that these things happened in the lifetime of this person in whose presence I’m sitting, and their life made such a difference in re-creating a South where he had to be out of town by sunset or his life was in danger,” recalled Carol Steiker, another clerk that year.

One task of the clerks was to write brief memorandums evaluating the thousands of cases appealed to the Supreme Court. Most written by Ms. Kagan are straightforward, but some caution against taking a case because of how the conservative justices might rule or elevate outcomes over the law.

For example, on Oct. 7, 1987, she analyzed a case in which a judge dismissed an immigrant’s guilty plea over a minor infraction because it could jeopardize his application for permanent residency. The Justice Department appealed, saying the district court had exceeded its authority.

Ms. Kagan wrote that the Justice Department’s view was “almost certainly correct.” Still, she recommended against taking the appeal because the judge had “ensured an equitable result” at “no great cost to the Republic.” Justice Marshall scrawled “D” for “deny” at the top of her memorandum.

In her hearing last year, Ms. Kagan distanced herself from those writings, saying her job was to “channel” Justice Marshall’s mind-set.

A clerk to a justice is “trying to facilitate his work, and to enable him to advance his goals and purposes as a justice,” she said, adding: “He knew what he thought about most issues. And for better or for worse, he was not really interested in engaging with his clerks on first principles.”

Indeed, while her 1993 tribute is couched in fond terms, the bulk of her remarks about cases that arose in her clerkship year concerned their disagreements.

In one case, he voted not to let a man pursue a discrimination claim because his lawyer, who was blind, accidentally left his name off an appeal, and a deadline expired. Ms. Kagan and fellow clerks sought to persuade Justice Marshall to change his vote until he grew annoyed and, pointing to his framed judicial commission on the wall, asked them whose name was on it.

But the case Justice Marshall cared about the most that year, she wrote, was the school bus dispute in which she had trouble justifying his dissent. The final draft seems to implicitly acknowledge that his vote rested less on legal doctrine than on his notion of social justice.

The case, it says, asked “whether a state may discriminate against the poor in providing access to education,” adding: “I regard this question as one of great urgency. As I have stated on prior occasions, proper analysis of equal protection claims depends less on choosing the formal label under which the claim should be reviewed than upon identifying and carefully analyzing the real interests at stake.”

LENA HORNE: 1917-2010--GREAT ARTIST AND CITIZEN

In Memory of Lena Horne

Lena Horne passed away on May 9, 2010.

Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1917 and grew up in both New York and Georgia. Lena showed such talent and beauty from early on that by the time she was sixteen she was performing in the chorus line at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Horne then joined Noble Sissle’s Orchestra followed by a stint with Charlie Barnet in 1940. At the time Lena preferred New York to touring and began performing at Café Society and replaced Dinah Shore as the vocalist in NBC’s show The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. Already at this time Horne had starred in some lower budget films but was signed by MGM and became the first black performer to sign a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio. Lena performed in the 1942 film ‘Panama Hattie’ and ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ in 1946. At this time the studios refused to put Lena in a leading role, aside from ‘Cabin in the Sky’ which featured all African Americans, because she was African American and all her scenes in movies had to be done in such a way that those scenes could be cut to be able to show these films in states where people had not yet evolved to the point of being able to handle seeing an African American on a movie screen.

Lena decided to focus on her music career in the early 1950s due in part to being blacklisted for her social views which included the idea that all people are created equal and should be given equal opportunity in America. Horne toured internationally and recorded one of her popular albums, ‘Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria’ in 1957 which at the time became the best selling record by a female vocalist on RCA-Victor. Horne was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1958 for her role in Jamaica. Also in the late 1950s and ‘60s Lena made appearances on all the popular television variety shows including The Ed Sullivan Show, Kraft Music Hall, The Dean Martin Show, The Judy Garland Show and The Andy Williams show among others. In 1970 she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in an hour long television special and in 1973 she did an hour long special with Tony Bennett. Horne also guest starred on many television sitcoms including The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, The Cosby Show, Sanford and Son and A Different World. In 1981 she received a special Tony Award for her one-woman show ‘Lena Horne: The Lady and her Music’. In 1988 Horne recorded the album ‘The Men in My Life’ with guests including Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams and in 1989 Lena won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Some of Lena Horne’s achievements for civil rights include working with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws, attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 as well as speaking and performing on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC and the National Council of Negro Women. Lena Horne was a warrior for civil rights and speaking out for the freedom of all people throughout her life as well as an incredible performer and entertainer. In the words of Quincy Jones, “Lena Horne was a pioneering groundbreaker, making inroads into a world that had never before been explored by African-American women, and she did it on her own terms. Our nation and the world has lost one of the great artistic icons of the 20th century. There will never be another like Lena Horne and I will miss her deeply."

“I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else.”

“You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way“

“Don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death.” – Lena Horne


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/arts/music/10horne.html?emc=eta1


All,

Lena Horne is a legend. There is no getting around that fundamental fact whether one considers it a cliche or not. Furthermore, it is impossible to understate the actual historical significance and social meaning of who Lena Horne was in the wider context of both 20th century American popular culture in general and African American culture specifically. It's also very important to remember that when the civil rights movement called on its popular artists to take open public stands on behalf of the goals and objectives of the movement for freedom, justice, and equality Ms. Horne was ALWAYS on the frontlines and never failed to make and maintain a strong outspoken committment to the larger principles of the movement whether it had a negative effect on her personal career or not. And despite the blatantly false assertion in the NY Times obit below Horne WAS blacklisted by both Hollywood and the television industry for at least 15 years because of her longtime intimate personal and political friendships with such important radical activists as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois which only added to the indifference, scorn, and criminal neglect of her and nearly every other well known black artist of the 1940-1970 era--especially those like Horne, who aside from being highly talented and beautiful also cared deeply about her people and the larger society and courageously put themselves and their careers on the line many times to say and do the right thing. Thus for many reasons--both artistic and political-- the strength, grace, luminous talent, and love of Ms. Horne will be sorely missed...

Kofi


Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
May 9, 2010
New York Times

Lena Horne, who broke new ground for black performers when she signed a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley. She lived in Manhattan. In a message of condolence, President Obama said Ms. Horne had "worked tirelessly to further the cause of justice and equality."

Ms. Horne first achieved fame in the 1940s, became a nightclub and recording star in the 1950s and made a triumphant return to the spotlight with a one-woman Broadway show in 1981. She might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early: she languished at MGM for years because of her race, although she was so light-skinned that when she was a child other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” film musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that, she later recalled, could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, whose singing voice was dubbed. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage, in 1947, took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing, and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work.

Although absent from the screen, Ms. Horne found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also “the only man I ever loved,” she said, but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc. (The war had scaled down Mr. Young’s ambitions to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor.) He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM. She was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio — MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 — but she was the first to make an impact.

Though she was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio - MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 - Ms. Horne was the first to make an impact.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated her contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter; Gail Lumet Buckley; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her son died of kidney failure in 1970; her husband died the following year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/AR2010051000091.html


Lena Horne dies at 92; performer altered Hollywood's image of black women
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2010; B05

Lena Horne, 92, an electrifying performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented black women and who enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in films, died of a heart ailment May 9 at a hospital in New York.

Ms. Horne, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.

"What people tend not to fully comprehend today is what Lena Horne did to transform the image of the African American woman in Hollywood," said Donald Bogle, a film historian.

"Movies are a powerful medium and always depicted African American women before Lena Horne as hefty, mammy-like maids who were ditzy and giggling," Bogle said. "Lena Horne becomes the first one the studios begin to look at differently. . . . Really just by being there, being composed and onscreen with her dignity intact, paved the way for a new day" for black actresses.

He said Ms. Horne's influence was apparent within a few years of her leaving Hollywood, starting with actress Dorothy Dandridge's movie work in the 1950s. Later, Halle Berry, who won the 2001 Best Actress Oscar for "Monster's Ball," called Ms. Horne an inspiration.

Ms. Horne's reputation in Hollywood rested on a handful of musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: "Cabin in the Sky," as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie "Rochester" Anderson; and "Stormy Weather," in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South.

"Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she told the New York Times in 1957. "So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut." In Hollywood, she received previously unheard-of star treatment for a black actor. Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Horne in movies and advertisements as glamorously as were white beauties including Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.

Nevertheless, Ms. Horne was frustrated by infrequent movie work and feeling limited in her development as an actress. She confronted studio officials about roles she thought demeaning, a decision that eventually hurt her.

James Gavin, a historian of cabaret acts who has written a biography of Ms. Horne, said: "Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar."

Ms. Horne appeared on television and at major concert halls in New York, London and Paris. She starred on Broadway twice, and her 1981 revue, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," set the standard for the one-person musical show, reviewers said. The performance also netted her a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards.

Gavin said Ms. Horne cultivated a "ferocious" singing personality through her flashing eyes and teeth.

"Unlike Perry Como and Bing Crosby, who were warm, familiar presences, Lena Horne was a fierce black woman and not a warm and fuzzy presence," Gavin said. "She was formidable and the first black cabaret star for white society."

Ms. Horne said she felt a need to act aloof onstage to protect herself from unwanted advances early in her career, especially from white audiences.

"They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman," she told the New York Daily News in 1997. "The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach. . . . I am too proud to let them think they can have any personal contact with me. They get the singer, but they are not going to get the woman."

For her repertoire, she chose the sophisticated ballads of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Billy Strayhorn. She loved the music but also said she liked surprising the white audience who expected black entertainers to sing hot jazz or blues and dance wildly.

In her singing, Ms. Horne showed great range and could convincingly shift between jazz, blues and cabaret ballads. New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised her "sense of dynamics that allowed her to whisper and wheedle and shout." In the early 1960s, Ms. Horne said she felt her sophisticated act sounded increasingly obsolete as she saw a younger generation at sit-ins and marches protesting racial discrimination.
'Good little symbol'

Ms. Horne struggled for years to find a public role on race matters. Her earliest mentors urged her to remain reserved and graceful in public, what she called "a good little symbol." In the late 1940s and 1950s, she chose to focus on quietly defying segregation policies at upscale hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas where she performed. At the time, it was customary for black entertainers to stay in black neighborhoods, but Ms. Horne successfully insisted that she and her musicians be allowed to stay wherever she entertained. One Las Vegas establishment reportedly had its chambermaids burn Ms. Horne's sheets.

In 1963, Ms. Horne appeared at the civil rights March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Ms. Horne also used her celebrity to rally frontline civil rights activists in the South and was a fundraiser for civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women.

Looking back, she said her legacy on race was complicated by her ambition. She said she married the white conductor and bandleader Lennie Hayton in 1947 -- her second marriage -- to advance her career, because "he could get me into places no black manager could."

"It was wrong of me, but as a black woman, I knew what I had against me," she told the Times in 1981. "He was a nice man who wasn't thinking all these things, and because he was a nice man and because he was in my corner, I began to love him."

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her mother, an actress, was largely absent from Ms. Horne's early life because of work on the black theater circuit.

Shifted at first among friends and relatives, Ms. Horne was raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, a stern social worker and suffragette in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Ms. Horne said she was influenced by her grandmother's "polite ferocity."

In 1933, when she was 16, Ms. Horne was reunited with her mother and new stepfather, a white Cuban. It was the peak of the Depression, and they lived on relief in Harlem. Ms. Horne was pushed into a job at the Cotton Club by her mother, who knew the Harlem nightclub's choreographer.

"I could carry a tune, but I could hardly have been called a singer," Ms. Horne said. "I was tall and skinny, and I had very little going me for except a pretty face and long, long hair that framed it rather nicely." Ms. Horne began by wearing three large feathers and doing a fan dance, but she took singing lessons and gradually won better parts.

Ms. Horne made $25 a week for three shows nightly seven days a week. Her stepfather went to see the racketeering club owners to raise Ms. Horne's salary. In reply, they had his head shoved down a toilet, Ms. Horne said.

Exhausted by 19, she fled to her father's home in Pittsburgh and married a friend of his, Louis J. Jones, a minor Democratic Party operative. She and Jones had two children, Gail and Edwin, but the marriage disintegrated over money quarrels.

Helped by record producer John Hammond, she won a long engagement at Manhattan's Cafe Society Downtown, the first integrated nightclub in the United States. She had a stormy affair with married boxer Joe Louis, a regular at the nightspot, and befriended entertainer and social activist Paul Robeson. Her friendship with Robeson, a communist sympathizer, was a key factor that led to her brief blacklisting a decade later.

Challenged the system
The work at Cafe Society Downtown prompted ecstatic reviews and led to Ms. Horne's career onscreen. Working closely with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, Ms. Horne said she wanted to "try to establish a different kind of image for Negro women." They successfully challenged the casting system that had long marginalized black performers onscreen by having them portray servants, minstrels or jungle natives.

To Ms. Horne's surprise, her efforts to overcome servile screen parts were resented by many black actors who viewed her as a threat more than a pioneer. She said she was perceived as a danger to the system of informal "captains" in the black acting community, who worked as liaisons with film producers when they needed "natives" for the latest Tarzan picture.

"I was not trying to embarrass anyone or show up my colleagues," Ms. Horne told Richard Schickel for his biography, "Lena" (1965). "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into. It was no crusade, though of course I hoped that if I could set my own terms in the movies and also be successful, then others might be able to follow."

Bored from infrequent movie work, she began taking outside singing engagements and devoted more time to advocating fair employment and anti-lynching laws. She also filed a complaint with the NAACP when she sang for soldiers at Fort Reilly, Kan., on a studio-sponsored tour and saw German prisoners of war seated ahead of black soldiers. This complaint irritated the studio.

MGM producer Arthur Freed was also unhappy that Ms. Horne refused to act in a Broadway show he had backed, "St. Louis Woman." She said the black characters were cliches and offensive. She said Freed took revenge by turning down her requests for plum movie assignments.

Ms. Horne returned to a lucrative singing career. At one point in the mid-1950s, she made $12,500 a week singing at Las Vegas casinos. Her 1957 best-selling album of jazz standards, "At the Waldorf Astoria," captured her at a peak moment -- at the tony New York hotel where she long performed, backed by an orchestra conducted by her husband, Hayton.

Hayton, from whom she had long been separated, died in 1971; her son died about the same time from a kidney ailment. Survivors include her daughter, the writer Gail Buckley; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Horne spoke of her 1981 one-woman show as the most liberating moment of her life, saying her identity was clear to her because "I no longer have to be a 'credit,' I don't have to be a 'symbol' to anybody. I don't have to be a 'first' to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/AR2010051003692.html


Lena Horne: A glamorous revolutionary By Eugene Robinson Tuesday, May 11, 2010; A15 Washington Post

"Lena Horne is coming on!"

When I was growing up, those words were the signal to drop everything and rush to the family room, where Ed Sullivan or Perry Como or Dean Martin had just announced the next performer. At the time, I didn't understand why it was unthinkable to miss one of Horne's appearances. I didn't yet realize that she was one of one of the most significant American entertainers of the 20th century -- and certainly didn't realize how burdened she was by her trailblazing success.

Horne, who died Sunday at 92, was an infiltrator. She strode confidently through doors that had been closed to African American entertainers, and she was able to do so because white audiences found her not just beautiful and talented but also non-threatening. Late in her life, she gave a sense of how difficult that role had been to play.

"My identity is very clear to me now," she said when she was 80. "I am a black woman. I'm free. I no longer have to be a 'credit.' I don't have to be a symbol to anybody; I don't have to be a first to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

Indeed, she was different. She was light-skinned, with just enough tan in her complexion to make it evident that she wasn't white. Her nose was narrow, almost turned-up; her hair, in the fashion of the times, was always straightened. She was, by any standard, gorgeous. But she knew that the racial ambiguity of her looks allowed her to attain a level of stardom that was inaccessible to singers and actors who conformed more closely to white America's image of "black."

There was no ambiguity, however, in her sense of herself as a black woman -- or in her strong political and social views. She was the first black performer to sign a long-term contract with one of the major Hollywood studios, earning $1,000 a week from MGM in the 1940s; she made thousands more from radio and nightclub appearances, and in 1945 she was described in a magazine article as "the nation's top Negro entertainer."

MGM cast her in a series of musicals, showcasing not just her voice but her beauty and sophistication. But the studio made sure that her scenes could be easily scissored out of prints of the movies that were destined for theaters in the South, where audiences would not have accepted a black actor as anything but a servant or a savage. Meanwhile, Horne was envied and even resented by other black actors in Hollywood who had to play servants and savages to get any work at all.

"They didn't make me into a maid, but they didn't make me anything else, either," Horne wrote in her autobiography. "I became a butterfly pinned to a column, singing away in Movieland."

Horne was always outspoken about civil rights. During World War II, she complained about how black soldiers -- who had made her a popular pinup, essentially the black Betty Grable -- were being treated in the segregated Army. Her refusal to perform for segregated audiences got her disinvited from USO tours.

Horne blamed her activism and her associations for the waning of her movie career after her MGM contract expired in 1950; actor Paul Robeson and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, both known for their left-leaning views, were among her good friends. There is no evidence that she was ever actually blacklisted, however. Tastes changed, and musicals became passe. By the time black actors began to get substantial dramatic roles in the movies, Horne was past leading-lady age.

She wasn't a great singer like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan. Hattie McDaniel and Dorothy Dandridge were better actors. But Lena Horne was a much more important figure in American social history, because she was able to bridge the gap between black and white in a way that others could not. She could be vocal, even strident in her advocacy for civil rights; she could be a proud black woman who stood up for African American causes and refused to back down. But she could do all of this without ever seeming alienated.

She would come on Ed Sullivan's show and sing "Stormy Weather," and she would own the stage -- a glamorous, elegant revolutionary who helped change the way American eyes perceived black and white.

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