A black man and a white woman competing for the presidential nomination. On Tuesday those of us willing to cast our vote for a Democrat will face this unprecedented choice. It’s a day made all the more momentous for being so jam-packed with primaries. Voters from coast to coast have the chance to feel uncharacteristically invested in the outcome, to feel that their ballots could be the decisive ones.

Of course there have been other elections similarly composed, less exalted yet even more fraught. I know of two previous race vs. gender elections, both from my hometown, Chicago. Here in Los Angeles, where I now live, I think of those elections as I try to see clearly past the signal noise to what is truly at stake in the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton showdown.

The famous – and infamous -- one was the Chicago mayoral race in which Harold Washington beat incumbent Jane Byrne for the Democratic nomination 25 years ago this month, going on to face a white male Republican (sound familiar?) in the general election to become the city’s first (and only) black mayor.

Those old enough to recall the overtly racist tone of that campaign cycle will find the current round of MLK/LBJ innuendo downright mild by comparison. “It’s a racial thing, don’t kid yourself. We’re fighting to keep the city the way it is,” said Alderman E.R. “Fast Eddie” Vyrdolyak, as he campaigned against Washington. Vyrdolyak (with his quintessentially Chicago-esque white ethnic last name) became Washington’s nemesis on the City Council, amassing an opposition bloc that protected the patronage-driven status quo and made it nearly impossible for the mayor to get anything done.

I was 14 then—too young to weigh in with my vote, as I had been during the campaign I witnessed first hand -- the one that launched my mother’s ten year stint as a state representative in the Illinois Legislature. Susan Catania was first elected in 1972, when I was 4, and was forced out just before Washington’s ascendance, when a tight state budget ended a practice that enabled her to slip into office and hang on to her seat in the most unlikely of circumstances for more than a decade.

My mother’s years as a public servant are one of the many knots of my upbringing that I’m only now, on the cusp of 40, beginning to untangle. I’ve long since gone from childish embrace to adolescent rejection and settled on shrugging acceptance, a promissory note for the personal-historical expedition I’m in the midst of now.

        She was in her early 30’s with four children under the age of 5, a degree in chemistry and a job in public relations at a chemical company. After she and my father got married in 1963, they moved to Lake Meadows, a new high-rise housing development on Chicago’s near South Side. Lake Meadows was part of the city’s massive “slum clearance” and subsequent “urban renewal” – a process that began in the 1940’s and continued into the 1970’s -- one of the largest such endeavors this country has ever seen.

The idea was to tear down carefully targeted segments of the ghetto, replacing them with market-rate housing as well as some housing for low-income residents. For those who were displaced, urban renewal promised quality, affordable housing, scattered throughout Chicago, integrated both economically and racially. But the reality looked more like this: tear down slums. Build market-rate housing that few former residents can afford. Build high-density, low-income housing, but not nearly enough, and all together, in one highly concentrated stretch, so that many, many people are forced back into what soon became just the kind of ghetto housing the city was purportedly getting rid of.

Lake Meadows was one of the first market-rate developments. Conceived of and developed as a series of modern, racially integrated apartment buildings, it occupied a 101-acre site a few blocks east of Lake Michigan. Located on the site of a former Civil War internment camp, the area had more recently housed an estimated 3,600 black families. Of those, about 900 qualified for the new -- and initially desirable-- public housing that was being built along State Street half a mile or so west. The rest were on their own.

Beginning in 1958, when the first apartments in the Lake Meadows complex became available, few, if any, of those low-income families could afford to move in. So who did? Middle-class families, black and white, including my own parents, who chose the complex, in part, because the company where my mother had landed her first job was located within walking distance. Moving there, living in close proximity to black people, was as radical an act as either of them had ever undertaken. By the time they got there, any whiff of racial and socio-economic discrimination had vanished. Lake Meadows represented progress and unity.

        At that point in their lives, my parents were apolitical. They were in their early 20’s and had no particular affinity for any party or political ideology. My mother’s grandmother had been a Republican election judge (even before she herself was granted the right to vote in the 1920’s), but her parents were both union members, her father as an industrial pattern-maker and her mother as a home economics teacher in the Chicago public schools. My father’s parents didn’t talk much about politics – his father had been brought to the U.S. from Italy as a baby and his mother, who had been born in Chicago and whose parents were both Italian, was a stay-at-home mother who may well not have even voted until my mother ran for office.

        It was my mother’s job that served as the catalyst for her politicization. She discovered that a male colleague whom she’d trained was being paid more than she, so she quit and filed a sex-discrimination lawsuit. Pregnant with her fourth child, she traveled to the state capitol in Springfield to testify on some legislation to repeal a law that said pregnant women were ineligible for unemployment compensation for three months before their babies was born and four weeks after, because they were incapable of working. During that time, if a company happened to lay a woman off, she would be denied unemployment benefits.

My mother, having worked right up to the due date of her three previous children (including me) and having gone back to work very shortly thereafter each time, knew this law to be ridiculous and unjust, not to mention a convenient way for unscrupulous employers to avoid having to pay unemployment compensation.

        But when my visibly pregnant mother appeared before the subcommittee to testify, the all-male, cigar-puffing panel treated her as an entertainment, with one member asking whether this were a “labor” bill and another wondering “if anyone ever considered the problem of a woman getting pregnant as the result of an industrial accident.” Not easily deterred, my mother returned to testify twice more as the bill moved through the legislative process. On her third visit, a companion pointed out her state legislator – an elderly black man whom, she noticed, slept through the entire hearing.

        Though the law was not repealed, my mother’s testimony helped enact legislation that shifted the burden of proof to the employer, who had to demonstrate that the pregnant employee (and later new mother) was incapable of working.

        Meanwhile she’d begun to put two and two together: changing state law was an exhilarating experience, one she wouldn’t mind repeating, and she knew her discrimination lawsuit would make finding another job more than a little bit of a challenge, especially now that she had four young children.

One of the legislators with whom she’d worked (and one of only three women in the State Legislature at the time) suggested that she run for a seat herself. She thought it was a great idea, but when she talked with a neighbor who worked on political campaigns, he laughed --for a long time. When he realized she was serious, he told her she’d have no chance breaking in as a Democrat, since the entire operation was controlled by the political machine of Mayor Richard Daley (the first) and suggested she consider running as a Republican.

Because of the arcane workings of the electoral process in Illinois (and in an effort to maintain some party balance), a practice called “cumulative voting” gave the minority party one legislative seat in each district (the majority party got two). It didn’t matter how few votes the candidate received, so long as he or she got the most of any candidate running in that party.

        The notion of running as a Republican gave my mother pause, if only for a moment. She’d been born and raised on the South Side, where members of the Grand Old Party was as rare as integrated swimming pools. But it didn’t take her long to overcome her hesitation. Chicago – meaning the Democrats— sustained a long tradition of political corruption, none of it to the advantage of the nearly all-black 22^nd legislative district where she lived. The Democrats seeking higher public office in the state were an equally scurrilous bunch. In any case, she reasoned, she had her own agenda rooted in helping the community. When she looked at it that way, party affiliation hardly mattered at all.

        Her opposition was incumbent Genoa Washington, the man she’d seen sleeping through the hearing in Springfield. Washington had been one of the first black graduates of Northwestern Law School and an accomplished legislator. But his health was declining – he had terminal cancer – and it was clear to my mother that he wasn’t an effective public servant. The Republican ward committeemen agreed to endorse my mother for a “handling” fee of $100 for each of the district’s 153 precincts. When she refused to pay, three additional candidates appeared on the Republican primary ballot, all of them black (my mother was the only white candidate to run for the seat during her entire tenure).

The first was a phantom candidate called “Earle Sardon,” a man no one had ever seen or heard of -- reporters who called my mother for interviews would ask if she knew how to get in touch with him. The second was Bessie Daniels, a black woman whose presence on the ballot was intended to split the female vote. When my mother reviewed the qualifying signatures on Daniels’ petitions, she found evidence of “roundtabling,” an all-too-common practice in those days in which a few pol operators sat around a table and passed the petitions around and around, filling them out into the wee hours. In this case they must have suffered a failure of imagination, having written the same names on page after page. Once my mother brought the irregularity to the attention of the Election Commission, Daniels’ candidacy was rendered invalid.

        That left Washington, my mother and a third candidate, another black man who managed to do some campaigning, though he was no match for my mother. Her heart set on winning, Susan Catania  took on the task with characteristic zeal.

With the phony candidates out of the way, she turned her attention to the search for Republican constituents. In a district in which most of the city’s public housing was concentrated, and in which the occupants of non-public housing were unlikely to welcome a stranger on their stoop, door-to-door campaigning was not much of an option. Those were pre-computerized days, and she spent months wedged into Vault 13 under the watchful eye of a man with a cane and a cigar on floor 3-M at City Hall -- a short floor that was quite possibly the inspiration for floor 7 ½ in “Being John Malkovich.”

For her labors she was rewarded with the names of between six and eight registered Republicans per precinct, for a grand total of between 918 and 1,224 potential supporters.

        That was enough to get a network going. Someone would hold a “coffee” in their living room and invite a few friends, one or two of whom would agree to host the next gathering, and so on. By the time the primary rolled around, my mother managed to come in second, which was all she needed to win a spot on the general election ballot in the fall.

        Then, three and a half weeks before the general election, Genoa Washington died. The Republican kingmakers immediately replaced his name on the ballot with that of one William O. Stewart, a local pol whose campaign consisted of pointing out that he was black and my mother was not, and that he was a lifelong resident of the district and she was not. It was an effective strategy for a man unknown to voters until the 11^th hour, but my mother’s efforts paid off and she won, by the narrowest of margins.

        In January of 1973, my sisters and I, clad in matching itchy pink and green French wool ensembles, attended our first inauguration, and my mother embarked on her decade as a legislator. At the beginning some critics faulted her for holding on to a seat that could have served as a training ground for a promising young black pol. But over time those voices faded, as she built an impeccable record as a champion of civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights.

        Susan Catania never viewed her race or her gender as barriers -- or her political party for that matter --never felt she had anything to apologize for. Throughout her years in the legislature she remained true to her original purpose, representing her constituents, never bowing to political pressure or compromise. It was an impressive stance, and good for the district, but it won her few friends among those who might have bankrolled and otherwise supported her later attempts to win elective office. When cumulative voting came to an end so did her career as a public servant.

        Having lived inside a campaign skewed by race and gender so early in my life, having witnessed firsthand the dealmaking endemic to political efficacy and having watched my mother navigate that terrain so remarkably and reject it so completely, I’m finding it hard to know where to cast my vote in this historic presidential primary. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama live up to the standards my mother set. For me a vote for either one is a compromise.

        “I’m not ready for Obama. Clinton is what I can handle right now.”
   
        At a recent social gathering in Los Angeles I’d asked the cocktail party question du jour: “Clinton or Obama?”

        She was the first to respond, a white woman in her mid-thirties. She was raised in the South, she explained, where the only working woman she knew was the black lady who cooked at the local diner. It was hard enough for her to grasp the notion of a woman as president, she said, let along a black person. She came from a conservative Republican family, she said, where “the ‘N’ word was used freely” and was now wrestling with the dictates of her upbringing. She was in no way proud of herself for thinking this way, she said.

            In this era where the worst forms of race hatred are often cloaked in the jargon of tolerance, this was the first time I’d heard someone I consider a peer describe herself, essentially, as racist. I think of my generation as having gotten past the overt struggle to embrace one another as equals. I think of our challenge as a more subtle one, rooted in our passive acceptance of insidious economic, cultural and institutional bias.
           
            Her honesty jolted me out of the mental lull I’d fallen into, a place where I had come to believe that -- despite the media's overheated claims to the contrary-- Barak Obama’s race would be of as little consequence to voters as Hillary Clinton’s gender. A place where I had been luxuriating in the thrill of an inevitable “first,” where it didn’t matter so much which one you picked, because both held equal appeal.

            So comfortable was I that I planned to cast my primary vote for John Edwards, the candidate whose views -- particularly with regard to American poverty and class divisions -- are most closely aligned with my own (he launched his candidacy in that national disgrace called post-Katrina New Orleans, bless him).

             Not that I expect Edwards, a South Carolina native, to win (when your polling numbers are mired in the teens and you can’t even win your home state you know you’re in trouble), but I hold out hope that his presence in the race and the debates might thrust these critical themes into the public dialogue.

            As recently as a couple of weeks ago my husband and I wondered whether Obama could withstand voter concern -- not over his race but over his acknowledged recreational cocaine use in his younger days.

            But this woman’s comments brought me back to earth, American-style. Her remarks led me to consider in a new light a survey conducted in the wake of Katrina by Michael Dawson’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Dawson found that among blacks polled, 78 percent said racial equality in the U.S. would never be achieved, at least not in their lifetime. Some 34 percent of whites polled agreed. I wonder now, as I re-assess Dawson's findings, if there were some among that 34 percent who didn’t WANT racial equality in their lifetime.

            The Southern woman went on to defend her stance by suggesting that Obama, begat of a white Kansan mother and Kenyan father, was not a "real" African American. For her it seems Obama is both too black and not black enough.

            Perhaps she felt enabled by some leading black Southern politicians, including Robert Ford, a state senator from South Carolina who claims to be an Obama fan and who told Time magazine a year ago that "we in the South don't believe America is ready to elect a black President."
Earlier this month Ford pooh-poohed Obama’s Iowa win, telling reporters "of course you're going to have white liberals in a Democratic primary vote for Obama. That's why I'm concerned. You've got people in this country who wouldn't even vote for a black for dogcatcher, and now you want to ask them to vote for one for president of the United States?"

            After Obama’s South Carolina landslide, it must have given him no small satisfaction to deliver his victory speech in the same hall where he launched his campaign in that state last year, shortly after Ford declared that an Obama nomination would be disastrous. According to the Charleston Post and Courier, Obama’s original speech was punctuated with a chorus of “Yes we can!” In celebration of Saturday’s victory, the crowd chanted, “Yes he did!”

            But he hasn’t done it yet, and if Ford and the Southerner prevail -- coming to the same defeatist conclusion while viewing the Obama candidacy from opposite sides of the racial divide -- he won't. Next week's Super Tuesday in which 22 states hold Democratic primaries or caucuses is, as Monday's Los Angeles Times puts it, "a particular challenge for Obama, who trails Clinton in most national polls."

            Perhaps the Southerner I spoke with is an anomaly, completely unrepresentative of anything or anyone other than herself. Or perhaps there are plenty of others like her, but enough others unlike her to render her personal biases, in the scheme of this election, irrelevant.

            I cheer myself with the memory of a Sunday morning in 1976 when a glossy pamphlet for presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter was slipped through our family’s mail slot. My father scooped it up and after a brief perusal tossed it aside. “No one named Jimmy will ever be president,” he declared, as if it were the most indisputable truth imaginable.

In the 1970's, the inner-city Catholic elementary school I attended on Chicago's South Side was ahead of its time in declaring Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday. One year my sister, a friend of hers and I threw him a party. We played pin the tail on the donkey, made a cake and sang "Happy Birthday Dr. King." We had some sense that big changes were on the way, and that he gave his life to make them happen. Decades later we're still waiting.

Of course there is much to celebrate: The passage of the Civil Rights Act. The end of apartheid in South Africa. Barak, Oprah, Condi, Colin. But the victories are minor compared with the challenges and injustices that remain, and with our failure to address them.

Three months from now will mark the 40th anniversary of King's assassination. What better time to reflect on our collective complacency in enabling segregation and discrimination as they exist today. Here, interspersed with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech (which appears in italics), are a few realities to ponder.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

A 2000 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development study found that whites were favored over similarly qualified African Americans 22% of the time in rental housing and 17% of the time in housing sales.
SOURCE: M. Turner et al., Discrimination in Metropolitan Housing Markets: National Results from Phase 1 of HDS 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) http://www.opportunityagenda.org/site/c.mwL5KkN0LvH/b.1629379/k.996D/African_Americans.html


In a sense we’ve come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Nearly 1 in 4 African Americans is uninsured, compared to 16% of the U.S. population. Rates of employer-based health coverage are just over 50% for employed African Americans, compared to over 70% for employed non-Hispanic whites.
SOURCE: Surgeon General’s Report, U.S. Deparment of Health and Human Services http://mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/cre/fact1.asp

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

A Boston Federal Reserve Bank study in 1990 found that the conventional mortgage loan rejection rate for African-American applicants in the Boston area was 82 percent higher than for white applicants with the same qualifications. More recent studies using a range of controls have yielded similar findings.
SOURCE: A.H. Munnell, L.E. Browne, J. McEneaney, and G.M.B. Tootell, “Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data,” American Economic Review 86, no. 1 (1996): 25-53; A.L. Ross and J. Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

“In the 1960s, African Americans lacked channels through which to make effective claims on the state. They were underrepresented in Congress, statelegislatures, city councils, police forces, and in influential positions in private corporations. Other than through collective action, whether sit-ins or violence, they had few ways to force their grievances onto public attention or persuade authorities to respond.

This changed as the new demography of urban politics, the victories of the civil rights movement, and affirmative action combined to open new channels of access. As selective incorporation bifurcated the African American social structure, unprecedented numbers of African Americans became public officials, bureaucrats, and administrators of social service agencies.

People who once might have led protests now held positions from which they could argue that civil violence was both unnecessary and counterproductive. Others remained in America’s inner cities, struggling to get by, disenfranchised, wary of the state, disillusioned with politicians, lacking leadership or a vision strong enough to mobilize them once again to make claims on the state.”
SOURCE: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=859

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

“Even at the height of the administration of Chicago’s first black mayor (Harold Washington), poor Southside Chicagoans found their political influence and patronage cut off by an administration that depended increasingly on a coalition of black middle- and upper-class supporters. The result was the “gradual withdrawal of grassroots persons from the mainstream black political scene.”
SOURCE: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=859

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

In 2004, a typical black family had an income that was only 58 percent of a typical white family's. In 1974, median black incomes were 63 percent those of whites.
SOURCE: Economic Mobility Project http://www.economicmobility.org/reports_and_research/?id=0007

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

One in three black children from middle-income families grew up to have higher incomes than their parents. Among whites, about two-thirds of the children from middle-income families grew up to have higher incomes than their parents. SOURCE: Economic Mobility Project http://www.economicmobility.org/reports_and_research/?id=0007

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

"Together, the combination of incarcerated felons and former inmates barred from voting means that about 1.4 million, or 13 percent, of African American men are effectively disenfranchised, a rate seven times the national average. Looking ahead to younger men, the situation appears even bleaker. If the current rate of incarceration continues, at some point in their lives 30 percent of the next generation of black men (according to The Sentencing Project) will face disenfranchisement, a fraction that rises to a possible stunning 40 percent of black men who live in states that permanently bar ex-offenders from voting. Many black men, moreover, evading warrants or just fearful of potential arrest, avoid the institutions and agents of the state, thereby eliminating themselves from participation in political action."
SOURCE: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=859

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Unequal law enforcement remains a problem in many places.

Data from the Los Angeles Police Department reveal that from July to November 2002, African-American drivers were three times more likely than whites to be asked to step out of their cars. They were also more likely to be patted down and body searched.
SOURCE: Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Wrong Then, Wrong Now: Racial Profiling Before and After September 11, 2001, www.lccr.org (30 September 2005); U.S. General Accounting Office, Better Targeting of Passengers for Personal Searches Could Produce Better Results (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 2000).

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

Although the proportion of African Americans living in high-poverty neighborhoods has declined over the last three decades, the racial gap in economic segregation has widened. In 1960, low-income African-American families were 3.8 times more likely than poor white families to live in high-poverty neighborhoods with limited resources; by 2000 they were 7.3 times more likely to live in those areas.
SOURCE: Poverty and Race Research Action Council analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, with the assistance of Nancy A. Denton and Bridget J. Anderson, 2005. http://www.opportunityagenda.org/site/c.mwL5KkN0LvH/b.1629379/k.996D/African_Americans.html


I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

Nearly two-thirds of African Americans displaced from the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina encountered housing discrimination, according to a study by the National Fair Housing Alliance. In 66% of telephone tests, housing providers favored white callers over African American callers. In three out of five tests in which the subjects applied in person at apartment complexes, housing providers favored whites over African Americans.
SOURCE: http://www.opportunityagenda.org/site/c.mwL5KkN0LvH/b.1993935/k.52B0/Katrina__One_Year_Later.htm

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

In one of the most comprehensive studies of post-Katrina conditions, the Advancement Project conducted interviews with more than 700 workers in New Orleans, finding that many African American survivors of the hurricane have been shut out of reconstruction jobs as a result of failed housing policies, discrimination, and a lack of transportation and other services.
SOURCE: http://www.opportunityagenda.org/site/c.mwL5KkN0LvH/b.1993935/k.52B0/Katrina__One_Year_Later.htm

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

A study that assessed whether a criminal record would damage job chances found that employers were more likely to call back white applicants with criminal records than African Americans without criminal records. SOURCE: D. Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology Vol.108, no.5 (2003): 937-75.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

“The current level of [school] segregation for Latinos is the highest recorded in the forty years these statistics have been collected, while the segregation of African Americans is back to what it was in the late 1960’s, before serious urban desegregation began.” SOURCE: A Research Brief from the Civil Rights Project, by Gary Orfield and Rebecca  Frankenberg (January 2008) http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/deseg/embargolasthavebecomefirst.pdf

I have a dream today.

African American children and youth constitute about 45% of children in public foster care and more than half of all children waiting to be adopted. SOURCE: Surgeon General’s Report http://mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/cre/fact1.asp

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

In 2000, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 71% of crack cocaine users were white, but 84% of those arrested for crack possession were African American. SOURCE: Amnesty International, U.S. Domestic Human Rights Program, Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2004).

This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

A 2003 study of temporary employment agencies in California found that employment agencies preferred less-qualified white applicants nearly three times as often as African American applicants. Studies in Milwaukee, New York, and other cities show similar results. SOURCE: J. Bussey and J. Trasvina, “Racial Preferences: The Treatment of White and African American Job Applicants by Temporary Employment Agencies in California,” December 2003, www.impactfund.org (13 August 2005).

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring. When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Transcript of Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, “I Have A Dream,” delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963 copied from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/treatise/king/mlk01.html

Video of Dr. King's speech: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

It's been nearly two years since the city of Los Angeles permitted a private developer to bulldoze a community farm in South Central Los Angeles. In these days of global warming and ever-expanding carbon footprints, the farm was a brilliant example of a community doing something right. Its demise is an urban outrage.

I wrote this story in February of 2006. It was never published.

Early every weekday morning, hundreds of tractor-trailers packed with fresh fruit and vegetables unload their goods at the Los Angeles Produce Market south of downtown. Peaches from Chile, apples from Brazil, and bananas from Ecuador are auctioned off and parceled out before journeying on to stores and restaurants from Beverly Hills to Boston. Only then are they sold to the public.

A dozen blocks away in South Central, an area of high unemployment, low incomes, and scarce supermarkets, Maria Gonzales sets out on a quest for something fresh and tasty just as the produce trucks are heading for the freeways. Most will not be stopping in her neighborhood.

Despite its proximity to one of the largest wholesale-produce distribution marts in the world, South Central faces a scarcity that confronts inner cities across the United States. Residents must travel out of their community to find much of the fresh food that routinely rumbles past.

Fortunately, Gonzales does not have to rely on the dictates of global commerce for her produce. Three years ago, she secured a backyard-size plot at the South Central Farm, a 14-acre urban garden just a few blocks from her home.

For $13 a month, to cover irrigation and portable toilets, the 70-year-old grandmother grows enough lima beans, radishes, broccoli, sugar cane, corn, and cactus to stock the kitchens of three generations of her family.

She scoffs at the idea of buying peaches and bananas imported from thousands of miles away when she can barter for them, freshly picked from a neighboring plot. During her frequent walks through the farm, she sometimes discovers greens and medicinal herbs she hasn’t seen since she left her native Jalisco on Mexico’s Pacific coast. “I love the farm,” Gonzales says in Spanish. “Without it I’d sit in my house all day and stare at the walls.”

Over the past 13 years, the South Central Farm has emerged as an urban antidote to a food supply increasingly defined by corporate domination, global transport, and product homogeneity.

In all, 350 low-income families work the land, their plots demarcated by a patchwork of salvaged chain-link fencing and made homey with plastic-crate seating and bowers fashioned from vines of the gourdlike chilacayote. Most of the farmers are immigrants from Mexico and Central America who rely on the food they grow to supplement wages from menial labor. “This project has cost the city practically nothing, while feeding families who might otherwise go hungry,” says a spokesman farmer who goes by the name Tezozomoc. “For all practical purposes, this is one of the most successful projects the city has ever had.”

But despite its success, the farm may soon be gone, supplanted by yet another hulking warehouse. The developer who owns the land has said that unless the farmers can come up with the market price for the property, he’ll kick them out. They are preparing for the worst, maintaining a 24-hour watch at the site, camping in a small cluster of tents near the entrance, and granting access to only those with gardens inside.

There is little public money available for the purchase, and the Trust for Public Land, which is leading an effort to raise the funds from private donors, acknowledges the difficulty in generating philanthropic interest in the site. “Public funding is very limited right now when it comes to urban parks or open space,” says Alina Bokde, a project manager with the Trust. “One of our challenges is connecting the wealth that exists in the city of Los Angeles with the community of South Central.”

The roots of activism began taking hold at 41st and Alameda in the mid-1980s, when the farm was a forgotten stretch of rotted out cars, squalid encampments, and garbage heaps.

Using eminent domain laws, the city took the land from private developer Ralph Horowitz, intending to build a giant trash-burning plant.

When an environmental impact report found that the operation would emit airborne toxins, angry residents launched a massive door-to-door canvassing drive and forced the city to back down.

After the 1992 Rodney King riots, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank secured permission from the city to clear the trash and make a garden.

Plots were doled out to the neediest families, and the farm was born.

Horowitz, however, did not forget the land. He sued to regain his property, intending to raze the farm for a warehouse, and in the summer of 2003, the city brokered a closed-door deal to sell him back the land.

The farmers had no intention of surrendering their urban oasis. They organized letter-writing campaigns, held fundraising concerts, and protested on the steps of city hall. They also marshaled a support network of civil rights attorneys, politicians, academics, and social workers, launching what became a three-year battle for survival.

Then, on March 1, Horowitz posted an eviction notice at the garden, requiring farmers to vacate within five days. At press time, their attorneys were still fighting to come to terms with the developer for the purchase of the land and the time to raise the necessary funds.

City leaders insist they cannot afford to repurchase the land, but some observers say no price is too high to secure such a dramatic example of grassroots urban renewal. “We struggle so, to create a sense of community, particularly in low-income areas,” says Ralph Fertig, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. “Here we are prepared to eviscerate the one unifying institution that came from the community itself.”

One of the largest urban gardens in the country, the South Central Farm provides what has come to be known as “food security,” a reliable source of nutrition and freedom from hunger.

The origin of the term is unclear, but in recent years it has been adopted by community advocates throughout the United States seeking to ensure that traditionally underserved neighborhoods have direct access to fresh produce, whether from farmer’s markets, subscription farms—where they buy advance shares of a harvest—or, better yet, their own gardens.

The farm, which is almost entirely crime-free, also acts as a safe, multigenerational gathering place for community meetings, church services, and concerts. After school, neighborhood kids gather at a cluster of picnic tables near an orchard of fruit trees to do homework or work in the newly created “teen garden.”

Devon G. Peña, professor of anthropology and American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, has studied the farm. “What I find so important here is that the South Central Farm is not just about food security, but also what I call food sovereignty,” Peña says. “If you want people to flourish, it is not enough to simply have food. What is going on here is that they are growing food that is part of their cultural cuisine. Invariably, what you wind up with is a situation where these folks don’t have the patterns of obesity and diabetes that you find in the larger Latino population.”

Recently, Peña launched a species study at the farm, identifying more than 150 different plants, nearly all of them traceable to heirloom varieties. Many of the farmers come from agricultural backgrounds and are practicing their craft at a highly developed level, Peña says.

“Unlike other urban farms I have seen, you are talking about a complex and cohesive agro-ecosystem,” he says. “There is a biodiversity, a knowledge of deepening the soil and intercropping, that is agriculturally sophisticated.” Peña has identified a dozen native varieties of Meso-American heirloom corn alone, with kernels in red, green, and black. “The range is incredible,” he says. “These folks are the seed-savers—the stewards of our agricultural biodiversity.”

Activists involved with the fight to save the farm are hoping to further extend the benefits of the two-square-block space. “It’s hard to try to solve something for just 350 families,” says Tezozomoc. “The strategy is that we have to have something feasible for the whole community.”

One plan, developed by 25-year-old farm volunteer and architectural designer Fernando Flores, calls for an ambitious transformation of the farm into a mixed-use space. There would be community rooms, art galleries, and a health clinic. The gardens would be more efficiently configured and smaller, creating 30 additional plots. “We know it’s a dream now,” Flores says. “But we have the will to make it real.”

That sense of urgency is palpable in an area so dense with warehouses and concrete that on any given day the sidewalks bordering the property are peopled with visitors who can’t even get inside the gardens.

South Central residents, hungry for open space, will settle for mere proximity to anything green. One afternoon, for example, as a factory worker spent his break reclining on an abandoned sofa in the shade of a banana tree that overhangs the sidewalk, two men climbed a ladder nearby, straining to reach guavas poking through the fence. Around the corner, another man sat on the curb reading the newspaper, while a couple on their lunch hour gazed into the garden as they dined on a picnic laid out on the trunk of their car, complete with metal utensils and a steel-topped salt shaker.

Yet even this bit of sidewalk wilderness is threatened. Inside the farm, working in her garden, Maria Gonzales pointed to a freshly planted corner. “Strawberries,” she said. “I hope we are here to see them grow.”

As we await full disclosure of the prosecutorial bungling that led to the January 4 slaying of Monica Thomas-Harris in Los Angeles by her estranged husband, we have this to mull: the deep—and largely ignored-- tensions between law-and-order approach to domestic violence and the African American community.

I did not know Monica Thomas-Harris and her family is reluctant to discuss the circumstances that led to her death. But with the help of court records and news accounts, I can imagine her struggling to balance her safety and the safety of her children with larger concerns about the mistreatment of blacks within the criminal justice system.

Monica Thomas married Curtis Bernard “Keno” Harris in June of 2001. News reports indicate that the wedding occurred while Harris was incarcerated on narcotics charges--he’d also spent time in prison for unlawful weapons possession – his nuptial circumstances a grim reminder that prison has become the de facto third place for many black men (although blacks account for only 12 percent of the U.S. population, 44 percent of all prisoners in the United States are black, the vast majority of them male, according to the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics).

The couple had a son together and raised him with Thomas-Harris’ daughter from an earlier relationship. But the marriage quickly soured, and in October of 2003 they separated. In 2005, after Curtis Harris attempted to break into his estranged wife’s home, she got a restraining order issued against him. In December of that year she filed for divorce.

What happened in the following months is unclear. News accounts describe Monica Thomas-Harris as a churchgoer. Perhaps she sought help there. Perhaps she encountered community denial. “Suggestions that battered victims ‘pray about” the violence …or accept God’s testing are examples of spritualizing intimate partner violence,” according to a study conducted in 2002 by the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, which also cites the “internalization of negative racial images” as a factor in violence both inside and outside the home.

In November of 2007, after Thomas-Harris had moved to a new home and the restraining order had lapsed, Curtis Harris tracked her down. He forcibly took her to a motel room, where he handcuffed and raped her before she escaped.

Thomas-Harris did not report her abduction and assault.

Maybe she was reluctant to send the father of her child back to prison.

Maybe she shared the resentment expressed by participants of the 2002 study, who called domestic violence a “ ‘white feminist’ issue where the needs of European Americans were (and are) elevated above those of African Americans, and women’s issues eclipsed those of men.”

Perhaps she recalled the story of Nicole Brown Simpson, the biggest domestic violence case in modern history. Simpson’s death – as well as her bruises and black eyes -- provided media fodder for months, leaving some blacks resentful of the attention paid to this white woman’s death while hundreds of deaths of black women by their African American partners went unnoticed.

Maybe she was afraid.

The next day, while Monica Thomas-Harris was at her job at a pet food manufacturing plant in Industry, Curtis Harris came after her. He forced her into his car, bound her with duct tape and threatened her with a stun gun.

This time she decided to turn him in. Monica Thomas-Harris reported both incidents to the police. Curtis Harris was jailed and sentenced to 16 months in prison.

Then the unthinkable happened.

A few days before Christmas, against the recommendation of his probation officer, who deemed him “unsuitable for release,” a judge agreed to let Harris, 34, out for a month to ensure his mortgage was paid and that his aging mother who lived with him was cared for.

It is standard practice for the courts to notify victims of domestic abuse before their batterer is released.

No one told Thomas-Harris, 37, that he was free.

When she did find out, most likely through a mutual acquaintance, she called Harris’ attorney. He never called her back. Then she went to the courthouse, in a state described by witnesses as physical distress. She reportedly talked with prosecutors about whether she needed a safety plan and should stay at a shelter.

The specific content of that conversation has not been revealed. Thomas-Harris returned to her home, her children and her community.

An entry posted by “family” on Jill Leovy’s Los Angeles Times LA County homicide blog after Thomas-Harris’ death offers some insight into the complicated response she may have encountered: “Curtis was my cousin and he was a mellow and loving person.[break] I do not agree with the way he handled the situation. This has torn our family apart. [break] The judge should not have let Curtis out of jail. Not because he was a kidnapping monster, only because he would have served those few months for the gun charge and got out. Maybe then he would have calmed down about the way he got there in the first place and been able to make a better decision.”

On the Thursday after New Year’s, Thomas-Harris left her Upland home and headed for work. A co-worker told reporters that she had called in to say that she had overslept. She never showed up.

When Monica Thomas-Harris’ 15-year-old daughter called her at about 5 p.m., the teen heard Harris yelling in the background. Thomas-Harris reassured her daughter, telling the child that she was fine before the line went dead. All subsequent calls went straight to voicemail.

Two days later, some two weeks after Harris’ release, he and Thomas-Harris were found in a motel room in Whittier, shot to death in an apparent murder-suicide.

Monica Thomas-Harris made the brave and difficult choice to report her abuser but the system that was supposed to protect her failed.

The outrage at the court’s handling of the case is clearly justified.

But rather than the end of the matter, that should be the starting point.

Monica Thomas-Harris will never become a household name. Unlike Donda West, the mother of hip-hop artist Kanye West whose death after plastic surgery has bounced along in the media for months, Thomas-Harris’ story doesn’t have the celebrity “legs” to surmount the considerable barriers of race and class.

But anger and grief over her death could be channeled into action, into the creation of an anti-domestic violence coalition by and for African Americans. For those who decry the balkanization such a body suggests, proponents need only say “Monica Thomas-Harris” and get back to work.