Segregated even in death

Max Whittaker for The New York Times - For decades, remains that were moved from the Gold Rush-era Negro Hill Cemetery were buried under headstones with a racial epithet.

Wedged between a strawberry patch and an encroaching swath of suburbia, the men and women who lie in the Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery are a long-dead, little-noted lot: a Mr. Outen, for example, who died in December 1862, or Elizabeth, the wife of James, who died in April some two decades later. But for the better part of five decades, the most notable tombstones at Mormon Island were those without names: 36 anonymous decedents whose grave markers shared a single, shocking label: “Moved from Nigger Hill Cemetery.”

Perhaps more jarring were the words that followed, saying that the headstones were placed “by U.S. Government” in 1954.

There is an explanation, albeit a tortured one. In the early 1950s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers was charged with relocating hundreds of graves from cemeteries due to be submerged by the creation of Folsom Lake, which was formed by a dam about 25 miles northeast of Sacramento. And one of those was a Gold Rush-era town known as Negro Hill.

Negro Hill Burial Ground Project


momentum for switching the stones really began to build only in 2009, when Josh Michael, a local Boy Scout, drafted an elaborate proposal to replace the markers to fulfill his community service obligation for becoming an Eagle Scout. Josh, now 15, was unavailable for comment because he was — no kidding — climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian

Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.

Trying to? Who doubts it? Well, other than Karl Rove, Fox-nuts and the extreme rightwingers?

Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.

That would make it George HW Bush's and Bill Clinton's presidencies.

Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote. “This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”

Not because they hate our way of life.


His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market. The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”

Belated Medal of Honor recipient

Vernon Baker, who was the only living black veteran awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in World War II, receiving it 52 years after he wiped out four German machine-gun nests on a hilltop in northern Italy, died Tuesday at his home near St. Maries, Idaho. He was 90. The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Ron Hodge, owner of the Hodge Funeral Home in St. Maries.

“I was a soldier and I had a job to do,” Mr. Baker said after receiving the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony on Jan. 13, 1997.

Rick Wilking/Reuters - Mr. Baker received the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton at age 77.

But in the segregated armed forces of World War II, black soldiers were usually confined to jobs in manual labor or supply units. Even when the Army allowed blacks to go into combat, it rarely accorded them the recognition they deserved. Of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded by all branches of the military during the war, not a single one went to any of the 1.2 million blacks in the service.

In the early 1990s, responding to requests from black veterans and a white former captain who had commanded black troops in combat, the Army asked Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., to investigate why no blacks had received the Medal of Honor during World War II. The inquiry found no documents proving that blacks had been discriminated against in decisions to award the medal, but concluded that a climate of racism had prevented recognition of heroic deeds.

Military historians gave the Army the names of 10 black servicemen who they believed should have been considered for the Medal of Honor. Then an Army board, looking at their files with all references to race deleted, decided that seven of these men deserved to be cited for bravery “above and beyond the call of duty.”

Four of the men — Lt. John R. Fox of Cincinnati; Pfc. Willy F. James Jr. of Kansas City, Mo.; Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers of Oklahoma City; and Pvt. George Watson of Birmingham, Ala. — had been killed in action. Two others — Staff Sgt. Edward A. Carter Jr. of Los Angeles and Lt. Charles L. Thomas of Detroit, who retired as a major — had died in the decades after the war. Those six received the medal posthumously at the White House ceremony in 1997.

Mr. Baker, the lone survivor among the seven, was greeted with a standing ovation as he entered the East Room to the strains of “God Bless America” played by the Marine Corps Band. As Mr. Clinton placed the Medal of Honor around his neck, Mr. Baker stared into space, a tear rolling down his left cheek. “I was thinking about what was going on up on the hill that day,” he said later.

That day was April 5, 1945. Lieutenant Baker, a small man — 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds — was leading 25 black infantrymen through a maze of German bunkers and machine gun nests near Viareggio, Italy, a coastal town north of Pisa. About 5 a.m., they reached the south side of a ravine, 250 yards from Castle Aghinolfi, a German stronghold they hoped to capture.

Lieutenant Baker observed a telescope pointing out of a slit. Crawling under the opening, he emptied the clip of his M-1 rifle, killing two German soldiers inside the position. Then he came upon a well-camouflaged machine-gun nest whose two-man crew was eating breakfast. He shot and killed both soldiers.

After Capt. John F. Runyon, his company commander, who was white, joined the group, a German soldier hurled a grenade that hit Captain Runyon in his helmet but failed to explode. Lieutenant Baker shot the German twice as he tried to flee. He then blasted open the concealed entrance of another dugout with a hand grenade, shot one German soldier who emerged, tossed another grenade into the dugout and entered it, firing his machine gun and killing two more Germans.

Enemy machine-gun and mortar fire began to inflict heavy casualties among the platoon. Lieutenant Baker’s company commander had gone back for reinforcements, but they never arrived, so the remnants of the platoon had to withdraw. Lieutenant Baker, supported by covering fire from one of his soldiers, destroyed two machine-gun positions to allow the evacuation. Seventeen of the men in the platoon had been killed by time the firefight ended. The next night, Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy minefields and heavy fire.

Lieutenant Baker received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for bravery. Asked a half-century later whether he had ever given up hope of being awarded the Medal of Honor, he seemed surprised. “I never thought about getting it,” he said.

Tom Davenport - Vernon Baker, a World War II veteran, received the nation's highest military award in 1997.

Freddie Stowers, a black veteran of World War I nominated for the medal in 1918, finally received it posthumously from President George Bush in 1991.

Vernon Joseph Baker was born on Dec. 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyo., the son of a carpenter. After his parents died in an automobile accident when he was 4, he and two older sisters moved in with their grandparents, who also lived in Cheyenne.

The youngster developed a penchant for trouble, so he was sent to Boys Town in Omaha at age 10. He stayed there for three years, then earned a high school diploma while living with an aunt in Iowa.

He joined the Army in June 1941 and was sent to Camp Wolters, Tex., for basic training — his first trip to the Deep South. When he boarded a bus to the camp after stepping off the train, the driver shouted a racial epithet and told him to “get to the back of the bus where you belong,” he recalled years later in an interview with The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.

When he began to show leadership potential, he was sent to Officer Candidate School, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1942. He went to Italy in 1944 with the 92nd Infantry Division’s 370th Regiment, which was composed of black enlisted men and black junior officers but had white officers in senior positions.


In October 1944, Lieutenant Baker was shot in the arm by a German soldier, and when he awoke from surgery he noticed that he was in a segregated hospital ward.

After the war, he remained in Italy for three years, then returned to the United States and re-enlisted. He stayed in the Army until 1968, then worked for the Red Cross at Fort Ord, Calif., counseling needy military families. After his first wife, Fern, died in 1986, he retired and moved to a rural section of Idaho to pursue his love of hunting.

Mr. Baker’s survivors include his second wife, Heidy; three children from his first marriage; a stepdaughter; and a stepgrandson.

Asked at the awards ceremony how he had felt about serving in a segregated unit, Mr. Baker replied: “I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it. My personal thoughts were that I knew things would get better, and I’m glad to say that I’m here to see it.”

Vernon Baker, Belated Medal of Honor Recipient, Dies at 90
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: July 14, 2010 - NY Times

Historian and self-confessed baseball nut

Reading column of 5 best baseball books in weekend WSJ, entry number 2 is book by Jules Tygiel.

July 4, 2008
Jules Tygiel, Historian, Dies at 59
By BRUCE WEBER

Correction Appended

Jules Tygiel, a historian and self-confessed baseball nut whose Brooklyn upbringing inspired his highly regarded scholarship on Jackie Robinson and on the integration of American society seen through the lens of baseball, died on Tuesday in San Francisco, where he lived. He was 59.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Luise Custer.

For 30 years, Mr. Tygiel (pronounced ty-GELL) worked in the history department at San Francisco State University, where he taught mostly conventional courses on the Great Depression, the history of California and the history of labor in the United States. His published works include the story of C. C. Julian, the Los Angeles oil business con man of the 1920’s, and a biography of Ronald Reagan. But if the classroom and the library were Mr. Tygiel’s intellectual haunts, his heart was on the ball field.

“Writing this book has allowed me to combine my vocation as a historian and my avocation as a baseball fanatic,” Mr. Tygiel wrote in an introduction to his best-known work, “Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy” (Oxford University Press, 1983).

“I spent joyous months poring over sports pages, reading microfilmed back issues of The Sporting News and devouring baseball biographies.”

A meticulously researched and gracefully written account of the relationship between blacks and professional baseball, the book begins with Robinson’s first game in what had been segregated white pro ball, on April 18, 1946, when he got four hits, including a home run, playing for the Montreal Royals of the International League.

From there it uses Robinson’s experience in Montreal and, beginning the next season, with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the centerpiece of a history of baseball’s integration — from the early days of the game through the appearance on the field, in 1959, of Pumpsie Green, the first black player for the last major league team to integrate, the Boston Red Sox.

A “rich, intelligent cultural history,” as it was described by Christopher Lehman-Haupt of The New York Times, the book was among the notable books in The Times’s Book Review of 1983. In 2002 it was ranked No. 50 on Sports Illustrated’s list of the top 100 sports books of all time.

“He loved all aspects of baseball,” Ms. Custer said. “And as an academic, it was important to him to write not just for academics.”

Jules Everett Tygiel was born in Brooklyn on March 9, 1949. His father and mother ran a store that sold and repaired pens, lighters and electric shavers. They lived in the East Flatbush section, not too far from Ebbets Field, home of Robinson’s Dodgers, and a place the young Mr. Tygiel first visited when he was 7.

“My favorite player was Jackie Robinson, largely because he integrated baseball,” Mr. Tygiel wrote. “I was not sure what this meant, but I knew it was wonderful. I thus learned my first lesson in race relations and politics.”

Mr. Tygiel graduated from Brooklyn College, then received his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the U.C.L.A. He taught at the University of Tennessee and the University of Virginia before settling at San Francisco State in 1978.

He wrote or edited several other books about race and baseball, including “Past Time: Baseball as History” (Oxford, 2000) and “Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race and Baseball History” (University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

His books on other subjects include “The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal in the Roaring Twenties” (Oxford, 1994) and “Ronald Reagan and the Rise of American Conservatism” (Longman, 2004).

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by his mother, Rose, of Tucson; a brother, Philip, also of Tucson; a sister, Martha, of the Bronx, and two sons, Charles, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Sam, of San Francisco.

Richard Zitrin, a law professor who was among Mr. Tygiel’s oldest friends, said Mr. Tygiel was especially proud of being the commissioner of the Pacific Ghost League, a fantasy baseball league — the first on the West Coast, Mr. Zitrin said — that the two men started in 1981. He wasn’t a bad sandlot ballplayer, either.

“Good shortstop, solid glove,” Mr. Zitrin said. “Slap hitter.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 8, 2008
An obituary on Friday about Jules Tygiel, a baseball historian noted for his writing on the role of Jackie Robinson in integrating baseball, referred incorrectly to the game Robinson played on April 18, 1946. It was his first game in what had been segregated white professional baseball, not his first pro game.

Civil-Rights Leader Sought a Bigger Role for Women

While more reticent than some of her male colleagues, Dorothy Height was one of a select group of leaders who coordinated the struggle for black civil rights in the 1960s. Ms. Height, who died Tuesday at age 98, was for 40 years the president of the National Council of Negro Women and the only woman among a group of leaders that included Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin and others.

In 1963, when Mr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Ms. Height was on the dais. She had tried and failed to persuade organizers that a woman should be among those to address the crowd. "Sometimes the men had trouble seeing why I was always linking desegregation with hunger and children and other social welfare issues," Ms. Height wrote in a 2003 memoir.

Ms. Height fought for civil rights from adolescence. The daughter of a contractor and a nurse in Rankin, Pa., she won a college scholarship with a speech about constitutional rights in an Elks Club elocution contest. But Barnard College, which initially had accepted her, refused to admit her because its quota of two black students for the class of 1933 had been filled. New York University then admitted her. "From that day forward," Ms. Height wrote, "I have loved every brick of that university."

While a student, Ms. Height lived in Harlem and attended nightclubs in the company of blues composer W.C. Handy. She marched in demonstrations in Times Square and on 125th Street. After working as a social worker, she switched to a job at the Young Women's Christian Association in Harlem. In 1937, she coordinated a visit to the YWCA by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to speak before the National Council of Negro Women.

Ms. Height went on to become a regular visitor to the White House, where she advised Ms. Roosevelt and presidents starting with Dwight Eisenhower. She led an effort to desegregate the YWCA after World War II, and in 1957 became president of the NCNW.

Ms. Height was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, as well as several honorary doctorates.

"Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality," President Barak Obama said in a statement Tuesday.

Ms. Height prized civility and in the 1960s spoke out against the "black power" movement, though she later came to embrace its goal of increased economic power. In 1995, she addressed the Million Man March. She continued to work until recently.

Starting in 2005, a musical biography titled "If This Hat Could Talk" toured the nation, including a repeat booking at Harlem's Apollo Theater.

"I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves," Ms. Height told a Denver audience in 2003. "Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."

—Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A8
* REMEMBRANCES
* APRIL 21, 2010
By STEPHEN MILLER
Dorothy Height 1912 - 2010
Civil-Rights Leader Sought a Bigger Role for Women

Civil Rights Photographer's Documentary

In some stories, you have more material than you know what to do with. That was the case yesterday as I worked on an obituary for legendary photographer Charles Moore, who shot the civil rights movement from 1958 to 1965 in his native South.

Luckily, a filmmaker made a 30-minute documentary, "I Fight With My Camera," in which Moore tells some of his great stories and many of his photos are shown. This film was shown on PBS, I'm told, but I missed it. It's incredibly moving and worth your time.

Included in the obituary itsef are some  amazing photos, including this iconic image:

Charles Moore photographed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1958 arrest in Montgomery, Ala. King's wife, Coretta, is second from right. (© Charles Moore/black Star)

Charles Moore, 79, dies; photographed civil rights violence
By Patricia Sullivan
Tuesday, March 16, 2010


Charles Moore, 79, whose searing Life magazine photographs of the civil rights struggle helped change American public opinion about the movement, died March 11 at a nursing home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He had kidney disease and other illnesses.

His photos of patrol officers roughing up the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., snarling police dogs attacking protesters, white civilians and police beating black demonstrators and the fierce spray of fire hoses pinning a trio of teenagers against a brick-walled building shocked the nation's conscience when the images began appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"The photographs of Bull Connor's police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood and make legislation not just necessary . . . but possible," historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said. Jacob Javits, the former Republican senator from New York, said Mr. Moore's photos "helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."


Traveling throughout the South, often with writer Michael S. Durham, Mr. Moore documented the violence and hope of the civil rights movement from 1958 until 1965. A piece of hurled concrete injured him in Birmingham, Ala., but he kept shooting. He was thrown in jail with a dozen angry white men who had been locked up for vagrancy and drunkenness. Enraged whites forced their way into his motel room at the University of Mississippi, where he had gone to cover the enrollment of James Meredith, the school's first black student, and began pounding on the former Golden Gloves boxer.

"I've never seen such hate in anyone's face before," he later said, according to John Kaplan, a professor at the University of Florida, who wrote his master's degree project on Mr. Moore. "It was like I were vermin."


At the time, half of the adults in the United States read Life magazine and its photography was world-renowned. Mr. Moore shot multiple cover photos and photo spreads that brought the civil rights struggle into starkly personal focus. His graphic coverage of the 1963 riots in Birmingham was spread over 11 pages, and its impact was immediate, provoking reactions from President John F. Kennedy, black activist Malcolm X and others. Artist Andy Warhol created "Mustard Race Riots," a silkscreen version of Mr. Moore's photograph of police dogs.

"In Birmingham when I saw the dogs I don't think anything appalled me more, and I've been to Vietnam," Mr. Moore told the New York Times in 1999. "I photographed it, and the world rushed in. I realized the power of even one image. . . . What changed was my awareness. I wanted to show how awful, how vulgar, how terrible this whole thing was."


Charles Lee Moore was born in Hackleburg, Ala., and grew up in Tuscumbia, Ala., the son of a Baptist minister who did not believe in racial epithets. Mr. Moore served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a photographer and attended the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif. He returned to his native state in 1957 to work at a portrait studio, and soon made his way to the local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser.

He quickly met King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "I photographed him at the pulpit with a cross behind his head. I got down low to get the power of this man," Mr. Moore told Kaplan. "From then on, I wanted to cover him. I wanted every assignment I could get." "I did not know at the time my pictures might make a difference. But I knew this man would make a difference," Mr. Moore said in the 1995 documentary "Charles Moore: I Fight with My Camera."


Mr. Moore was the only photographer on hand in 1958 when King was arrested after trying to attend a court hearing for his aide Ralph Abernathy. He jumped behind a police booking station counter to shoot a photo of King being manhandled by the police. The photograph went out on the Associated Press wires, and Life magazine included it in its next issue, launching his career.

He told The Washington Post about another incident in Montgomery a few years later. "I saw the guy pull that bat out of a bag. I shot while I was still running. I got three or four quick shots off. He's swinging that bat at that woman, right at her head. If you look closely, someone else has a thick chain and maybe a Coke or beer bottle.


"It makes me sick every time I see it," he said. "It was a pretty powerful statement about what lengths white people in the South could go to stop integration."


In 1962, he tried to leave Alabama for New York, but returned to the South when the founder of the Black Star photo agency gave him a small retainer to cover the civil rights movement.


Trading on his Southern heritage, Moore was the only Life magazine photographer able to persuade Mississippi's defiant governor, Ross Barnett, to pose for a picture. As Meredith tried to enroll at the university, Moore talked his way inside the administration building, where 200 unarmed federal marshals were holed up. After a night of violence, in which a French reporter and a local man were killed, he had the only photos of the mayhem inside: 28 marshals had been shot and 160 others injured.


He moved on to cover the Ku Klux Klan and the Selma to Montgomery marches, including a violent clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that became known as "Bloody Sunday." Mr. Moore became so well-known for finding the story that Durham, his Life magazine journalist partner, said, "At one point . . . a well known TV reporter said that when trouble starts happening on the civil rights story, find out where Charles Moore is." Durham wrote "Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore" (1991).

In 1965, sick of the violence he had experienced, Mr. Moore left the country for most of a year. When he returned, he resumed freelancing, focusing on conflicts in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Vietnam. He was a freelancer for numerous magazines, doing travel stories and corporate portraiture.


In 1968, when King was assassinated, Mr. Moore was in Palo Alto, Calif., on a magazine assignment. "We had on the radio and heard the flash," he told Kaplan. "I just pulled the car over to the side, listened to the news and cried. After all I'd done, I felt bad I couldn't be there on that day in Memphis in 1968. I knew him and he knew me."


After he won the first Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism in 1989, there was new interest in his civil rights photos. In addition to his book of civil rights photos, he also published "The Mother Lode," a book on Gold Rush country in California's Sierra Mountains.


His six marriages ended in divorce.


Survivors include four children from his second marriage, Michael Moore and April Marshall, both of Dothan, Ala., Gary Moore, of Lewisville, Tex., and Michelle Moore Peel of West Palm Beach, Fla.; a brother; seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.