The World Has Lost a Jewel

I usually use my time on WAMC to talk about policy questions. And I had prepared something else. But sometimes it feels appropriate to talk about something that feels very personal. We just came back from the memorial service for Bernard F. Ashe. One of the least pleasant parts of life is going to the funerals and memorial services for old friends to say good-bye. I don’t know how many of you knew Bernard or knew anything about his career. We have lost a friend but the reason I want to talk about him is that the world has lost a jewel.

Bernard was a Black man, the son of an attorney, who grew up knowing some of the giants of the Civil Rights Movement, including people like Thurgood Marshall. I met Marshall and some of the top lawyers of the movement but didn’t know them – there’s a difference. Bernard went to Howard Law School. The very prominent Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, who had taught at Harvard Law, recommended some of the excellent students he had taught at Harvard for the faculty at Howard. People often make assumptions about the quality of schools aimed to educate African-Americans. To be clear, some of the finest minds in the Civil Rights Movement studied and taught at Howard. Bernard had been inspired by the fight for equal rights and when he graduated he aimed to join it.

The quality of Bernard’s mind was quickly recognized by both Black and white lawyers. I got a taste of what struck them when I invited Barnard to a meeting of a New York Civil Liberties Union legal committee. A few softly-spoken questions changed our course.

Bernard did play a role in the Civil Rights Movement and in the integration of the American Bar Association where he was invited to be one of the first African-American members of their board of Governors. He was a respected voice in the organization.

Bernard quickly focused on labor and unions. It’s too simple to say that he came to Albany as general counsel of New York State United Teachers. He came to Albany to create that office, staff and shape it. At the memorial service, one of the men who worked for him reported going to Bernard to tell him there was no law on the point they were trying to address, and Bernard’s response, “There will be.” It’s often a lawyer’s job to shape the law, to show the courts how the ambiguities of law should be understood. That was certainly what he wanted his legal staff at NYSUT to do. Bernard served there for decades, shaping New York employment law from that position.

Bernard Ashe was a modest man who didn’t like to talk about himself, saying you can look it up, but he had an enormous amount to be proud of. As a Black man he was a first and only at many things but, never a token, he changed everything he touched for the better.

I know from personal experience the enormous respect other lawyers had for him, here and around the country. But we knew Bernard as a friend – a lovely, thoughtful, caring man. We will always miss him but always feel blessed to have known him. We have lost a friend. The world has lost a jewel.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on March 28, 2023.

Ayesha Rascoe

My commentary over the past few weeks has been driven by the politics – I’ve been worried, upset, and haven’t been sleeping very well, so even though some of us are still working on the election, I want to relax a little and talk about something that’s much more fun.

There’ve been comments about Ayesha Rascoe on the listener comment line. Here’s my take about her.

I certainly hear the African-American accents in her voice. Hallelujah.

I also hear her enthusiasm and I enjoy it.

Let me add that each new NPR voice potentially brings in a new audience to hear the quality of news that NPR provides. That matters.

So let’s back up. NPR has been breaking barriers for the benefit of us all since it was formed. Some of us remember the founding women of NPR – Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts – every one of them savvy, unique, warm, caring voices and every one a woman. I remember meeting Cokie Roberts’ father on a tour of the Capital years ago when he was the House majority leader –  nobody was going to hide the politics from his daughter, Cokie, and I’ve used the Haggadah she and her husband wrote for interfaith families like theirs – and ours. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Nina Totenberg. She’s been a sane and insightful Supreme Court reporter,  covering an institution I’ve studied and written about for decades. I’m all ears when she’s on the air. Linda Wertheimer had family ties to activism for a cleaner politics. I never got a taste for Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish but I loved the warmth in her voice much as I do Scott Simon’s warm voice now. I loved them all.

Warmth matters, by the way. I have never forgotten waking up decades ago to the description of a father wiping leaves off the coffin of his son in Central America as a result of the wars there. It matters that we care.

And it’s been obvious that NPR has continued bringing on reporters and hosts from all religious and family backgrounds – as a former Peace Corps Volunteer I notice those things and I’ve been delighted. NPR isn’t perfect – what human institution could be – but its view of the world is broad and much more helpful than most – which is why I listen. I treasure its diversity of voices and subjects – not just because they’re diverse but because their choices are enlightening. Not merely traditional, they probe and help us to see the world more deeply.

Rascoe is not the first African-American voice on NPR but she is the first that you didn’t have to Google to find out. On television you can see, but on radio you have to hear or be told. Her speech isn’t traditional or familiar for some people but then purists like me shake our fists at people who talk about “this point in time” when they could just have said “now.” Yes, I hate cliches.

Rascoe is no cliché – she’s a breathe of fresh air.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Nov. 15, 2022.

Teamwork

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I want to raise an important issue that’s been crowded out by the headlines.

Many people are upset about the whole idea of affirmative action or otherwise taking specific note of the needs of Black folk. For many, that seems completely new, like we never did that for anybody before. When I was a kid, the two parties in New York carefully balanced their tickets with Protestants, Catholics and Jews for statewide offices. To many, that seemed OK because everybody involved was “White” and only Blacks noticed their absence.  Few remember now that people had been referring to Jews, Italians and Irish as races, and Southern Europeans and semitic peoples were not the least shamed by their swarthy skin. The world changes – now everybody but Blacks are white and the Blacks are the new kids on the block.

Norman Rockwell did the famous Four Freedoms posters for American war bonds in World War II, and the iconic covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a national magazine, including the sweet picture of the doctor putting his stethoscope on a little girl’s doll. Rockwell also painted Moving Day, depicting the arrival of a moving truck with Black children and their baseball equipment opposite a group of similarly equipped white children, the two groups standing there not knowing what to say. “Play Ball” was the obvious answer.

Sports used to be about learning teamwork. We learned to cooperate, help each other for the sake of the team, and we did it together with kids of all backgrounds. I’ll never forget taking a cab with some friends to a demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City against the war in Vietnam. The cab driver was pretty obviously unhappy with us – he realized the four of us were carrying candles to light at a well-publicized demonstration. I remember turning the conversation to the Mets. The Mets had never made it out of last place, but this year, 1969, they were fighting for the championship. Mayor John Lindsay, was literally campaigning for re-election from the Met dugout. It seemed like the whole world was for the Mets – at least in New York City. The change on our taxi driver’s face was obvious – how could such nice Mets fans be against the war!

Some of you may remember Pee Wee Reese, the long time Brooklyn Dodger shortstop and captain. In 1947, when the Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson up as the first Black major league ballplayer of the twentieth Century, some Dodgers groused about having to play with a Black man. Reese got up at a team meeting and told his teammates they weren’t going to win in spite of Jackie – they were going to win because of Jackie. In fact, the Dodgers became the dominant team in the National League for the rest of Jackie’s career. As Jackie aged and skills declined, a Dodger manager benched him, but the team played poorly. It fell to Reese to tell their manager his teammates wanted Jackie on the field. Jackie was restored to the lineup and the Dodgers won the pennant again.

Sports matters and teamwork matters, and it matters to America. We cannot make a greater America by fighting and killing each other, by wasting our energies kicking each other off the team of America the way that white supremacists want us to do. We can only destroy the country we love.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 19, 2022.

The Ballad for Americans

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Assuming elections were rigged because they dislike the results and claiming victory instead doesn’t make it so; it just assumes away any reliable way to count the people’s votes. Election rigging can’t be prevented by eliminating the rules. And of course it’s the pot calling the kettle black, as the worst rigging took place in the segregated states and now takes place in Red states trying to rewrite the laws to get the results they want by excluding people from the polls, or by gerrymandering in you-win-you-lose fashion. If politicians can choose their voters, the results aren’t elections. That’s the problem, not the cure.

They want to control the story of America and get furious at mention

• That settlement of this country did not start at Plymouth Rock,
• That the Natives, the Spanish and the Dutch were here first and made enormous contributions to this country’s history,
• And, especially, that when Blacks were enslaved and brought over, they were assigned all the skilled trades on the plantations – who else would do them?
• And that white mobs repeatedly wiped out the enormous history of Black achievement by burning and tearing down their communities, lynching their men and driving them out of skilled professions.

Talk about cancel culture, their political aim is to cancel out everyone else’s contribution to America.

Larry Diamond points out that “sometimes it takes a dose of populism to fight populism.” My America is extraordinarily well represented in the 1940s hit, Ballad for Americans, narrated on CBS by the chocolate brown star of stage, screen and opera, Paul Robeson. Robeson’s presence and his wild popularity in 1940 were important not because any color is better than any other but because Americans relished his talent regardless of color, and understood that bleeding hearts and powerful minds are encased in skin of every hue. It was sung at conventions and by politicians on all sides of the political spectrum, rebroadcast on CBS by popular demand and later covered by Frank Sinatra.

The broadcast starts with members of the audience asking who he is? Robeson responded:

Well, I’m everybody who’s nobody. I’m the nobody who’s everybody. I’m just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek and Turk and Czech and double-Czech American.”

And then he went on to sing the list of occupations.

I’m an

Engineer, musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher,

How about a farmer? Also. Office clerk? Yes sir! …

Factory worker? … Yes ma’am. …

Truck driver? Definitely!

Miner, seamstress, ditchdigger, all of them.

I am the “etceteras” and the “and so forths” that do the work.

Questioned by the audience, Robeson went back through the list of ethnic and religious groups.

And he finished by singing “And you know who I am. …  America.”

Folks that’s an America we can believe in, a people who have a lot more to be proud of than their individual skin colors. The Ballad for Americans is well worth listening to; it will get your juices flowing and your heart singing for the real America.

The white nationalist program is a disaster not because there is anything wrong with the color white but because when you take America apart everything falls apart – nothing in America is color-, religion-, or ethnic-origin pure; men and women are part of everything; and nothing works when people and their minds and muscle are pulled out of the mechanism that is America. We don’t fight as well, we don’t build as well, we don’t invent as well and we don’t sing as well. America is in shambles without all of us.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on January 11, 2022.

Heaven Forbid We Expose Our Kids to Reality

So the latest seems to be that the political wrong wants their kids taught fairy tales and shielded from reality. Imagine – some schools and teachers are teaching what they call “critical race theory.” I would defy anyone to define it – academic language is like that and we fight endlessly about meaning and method. But never mind, whatever it is, that’s what they claim they’re attacking. In one form or another they want to make sure that their kids, and our kids, are never exposed to the idea that white people in America could have done something wrong or white cops either – wrong behavior is only for people of color but white people are by definition correct. Woopy, nothing new there.

In their churches, of course, of whatever denomination, confession is important, getting right with the Lord – in many faiths right there in front of the flock. But nations? Never? Our nation never makes a mistake, and therefore it never has to correct a mistake. It wouldn’t be hard to list the mistakes that mattered and still matter but it would be offensive to the thin skins of people who’s egos are wrapped in the color of their skin.

Of course those attacking schools and teachers are resorting to the same tactics they used against Congress on Dec. 6 – threats, intimidation, violence and murder. That too is nothing new. Years ago we had a struggle over teaching kids evolution. I don’t know how you go on in biology without understanding the process of genetic mutation. But I guess their kids didn’t need to inhabit any such sophisticated field.

Now the extreme wrong wants to whitewash – pun definitely intended – they want to whitewash the history of race relations in this country so that the white toughs never did anything wrong – when told to quit this or that, they followed the law instantly and still do. That’s a fairy tale. Dealing with racial discrimination, racial violence, racial injustice in all its forms has been a continuing struggle.

And teachers are now being harassed and threatened. I sympathize. But I also have a solution. Back in 1987 I published an article in the New York University Law Review titled In the Name of Patriotism. It’s subject was, as the subtitle read, the constitutionality, really the unconstitutionality, of “bending” history in public secondary schools. It was reprinted a couple of years later in a professional publication for history teachers. The idea was simple. I was not saying that teachers had to teach this or that. I just argued they had to be fair to both sides. Want to confront the goons from the hit squads that insist they never do anything for which they should be justly criticized? Simple – just tell the kids to report on both sides of the controversy. The kids won’t need much coaching and white supremacist parents aren’t going to like the results but whom are they going to fire for it? I don’t think their kids are going to end up with much respect for parents who cannot admit mistakes. But that’s their problem. They want to fight about it, let them get hurt in the battle – risking their kids’ disrespect.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 29, 2021.