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Franklin Runyon Sousley (September 19, 1925 – March 21, 1945) was a United States Marine who was killed in action during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. He was one of the six marines who raised the second of two U.S. flags on top of Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945, as shown in the iconic photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

The first flag raised and flown over the mountain at the south end of Iwo Jima was regarded to be too small to be seen by the thousands of Marines fighting on the other side of Iwo Jima, so it was replaced on the same day by a larger one. Although there were photographs taken of the first flag flying on Mount Suribachi after it was captured, there was no single photograph taken of Marines raising the flag. The second flag raising became famous and took precedence over the first flag raising after the photograph of it appeared worldwide in newspapers. The second flag raising was also filmed in color.

The Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, was modeled after the historic photograph of six Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

Early life
Sousley was born in Hill Top, Kentucky, the second child born to Merle Duke Sousley (1899–1934) and Goldie Mitchell (November 9, 1904 – March 14, 1988). When he was two years old, his five-year-old brother, Malcolm Brooks Sousley (November 24, 1923 – May 30, 1928), died due to appendicitis.  Franklin attended a two-room schoolhouse in nearby Elizaville, and attended Fleming County High School in nearby Flemingsburg from ninth to twelfth grade. His younger brother Julian was born in May 1933, and his father died due to diabetes complications a year later, at age 35. At only nine years old, Franklin was the sole male-figure in the family, and assisted his mother in raising Julian. Sousley graduated from Fleming High School in May 1943, and resided in Dayton, Ohio as a worker in a refrigerator factory.

World War II

U.S. Marine Corps
Sousley received his draft notice, and chose to join the United States Marine Corps on January 5, 1944. He was sent to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, California. On March 15, he joined E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marine Regiment, Fifth Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California. In September, the 5th Division was sent to Hawaii for more training to prepare for the invasion of Iwo Jima. On November 22, he was promoted to private first class.

Battle of Iwo Jima
Private First Class Sousley landed with his unit at the southeast end of Iwo Jima near Mount Suribachi which was the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines objective on February 19, 1945, and fought in the battle for the capture of the island.

First flag-raising

On the morning of February 23, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler W. Johnson, commander of the Second Battalion, 28th Marines, ordered E Company's executive officer, First Lieutenant Harold Schrier, to take a platoon-size patrol up 556-foot high Mount Suribachi to seize and occupy the crest, and if possible, raise the battalion's flag to signal the summit was secure. E Company's Commander Captain Dave Severance assembled the remainder of his Third Platoon and members from the battalion to form a 40-man patrol. At 8:30 a.m., the patrol started climbing the volcano. When the patrol reached the rim of the crater a brief firefight developed. Once they overcame the Japanese they secured the summit. A Japanese steel pipe was found for use as a flagpole and the flag was attached to it. The flag was then raised by Lt. Schrier, Platoon Sergeant Ernest Thomas, Sergeant Henry Hansen, and Corporal Charles Lindberg at approximately 10:30 a.m. Seeing the national colors flying caused loud cheering with some gunfire from the Marines, sailors, and Coast Guardsmen on the beach below and from the men on the ships near and docked at the beach. The men at, around, and holding the flagstaff were photographed several times by Staff Sgt. Louis R. Lowery, a photographer with Leatherneck magazine who accompanied the patrol up the mountain. Platoon Sgt. Thomas was killed on Iwo Jima on March 3, and Sgt. Hansen was killed on March 1.

Second flag-raising

Lt. Col. Johnson decided that a larger flag should be taken up and flown on Mount Suribachi after he determined that the battalion's flag was too small to be seen by the thousands of Marines fighting on the other side of the mountain. Around noon, Marine Sergeant Michael Strank, a squad leader of Second Platoon, Easy Company, was ordered by his Company Commander Captain Dave Severance, to take three Marines from his rifle squad and raise a larger flag on top of Mount Suribachi. Sgt. Strank chose Corporal Harlon Block, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Pfc. Sousley. On the way up the four Marines took telephone communication wire (or supplies). Private First Class Rene Gagnon, the Second Battalion's runner (messenger) for Easy Company, was ordered by Lt. Col. Johnson to take the replacement flag up the mountain and return with the first flag.

Once on top, Sgt. Strank ordered Pfc. Hayes and Pfc. Sousley to find a steel pipe to attach the replacement flag unto. A Japanese iron pipe was found and the flag attached to it. As Sgt. Strank and his three Marines were about to raise the flagstaff, he yelled out to two nearby Marines to help them raise the heavy flagstaff. Under Lt. Schrier's orders, Sgt. Strank, Cpl. Block (incorrectly identified as Sgt. Hansen until January 1947), Pfc. Hayes, Pfc. Sousley, Private First Class Harold Schultz, and Private First Class Harold Keller raised the second flag at approximately 1 p.m. as the first flagstaff was lowered. Pfc. Schultz and Pfc. Keller were both members of Lt. Schrier's patrol. Due to the high winds on Mount Suribachi, Navy Corpsman John Bradley helped some Marines make the flagstaff stay vertical. Afterwards, rocks were added to the bottom of the flagstaff which was then stabilized by three guy-ropes. The second raising was immortalized by the black-and-white photograph of the flag raising by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press; On June 23, 2016, Harold Keller was identified as Sousley in the photo and Sousley was identified as Navy Corpsman John Bradley in the photo (Bradley was no longer determined to be in the photo).  Marine photographer Sergeant Bill Genaust also filmed the second flag raising in color.

On March 14, another American flag was officially raised up a flagpole by two Marines under the orders of Lt. Gen. Holland Smith during a ceremony at the V Amphibious Corps command post on the other side of Mount Suribachi where the 3rd Marine Division troops were located. The flag flying on the summit of Mount Suribachi since February 23 was taken down. On March 26, 1945, the island was considered secure and the battle of Iwo Jima was officially ended. The 28th Marines left Iwo Jima on March 27 and returned to Hawaii to the 5th Marine Division training camp. Lt. Col. Johnson was killed on Iwo Jima on March 2, Sgt. Genaust was killed on March 4, Sgt. Strank and Cpl. Block were killed on March 1, and Pfc. Sousley was killed on March 21.

Death
On March 20, 1945, the Marine Corps was ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt to send the flag raisers in Rosenthal's photo after the battle to Washington D.C. as a public morale factor and to participate in a much needed war bond selling tour. Sgt. Strank and Cpl. Block were killed on March 1. Pfc. Sousley was killed on March 21. The book Flags of Our Fathers (2000) by James Bradley (son of Navy corpsman John Bradley who accompanied the 40-man patrol up the mountain), says Pfc. Sousley was shot in the back by a Japanese sniper as he was walking down an open road which was a known area of enemy sniper fire, and speculated that he lost his focus or thought the Japanese had stopped firing. According to the book, a fellow Marine saw Sousley lying on the ground and asked, "How bad are you hit?"  Sousley's last words were, "Not bad, I can't feel a thing." He then died of his injuries. However, Rene Gagnon, who knew Sousley personally for several months and saw Sousley the day he was killed, had signed an affidavit for the Marine Corps reporting that Sousley was killed instantly.

Pfc. Sousley's body was buried at the 5th Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima, on March 25, 1945. A service was held there in the morning of March 26 by the division's surviving Marines, which included Ira Hayes and other members of Sousley's platoon and company before they departed Iwo Jima the next day. Sousley's remains were reinterred on May 8, 1948, in Elizaville Cemetery in Fleming County, Kentucky.

Marine Corps War Memorial

The Marine Corps War Memorial (also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial) in Arlington, Virginia, was dedicated on November 10, 1954. The monument was sculpted by Felix de Weldon from the image of the second flag raising on Mount Suribachi. Due to some incorrect identifications of the second flag raisers, Sousley is depicted as the third instead of the fifth 32-foot (9.8 M) bronze statue from the bottom of the flagstaff since June 13, 2016 (Harold Schultz is depicted as the fifth bronze statue). The Memorial was turned over to the National Park Service in 1955.

During the dedication, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sat upfront with Vice President Richard Nixon, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Anderson, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Orme Lewis, and General Lemuel C. Shepherd, the 20th Commandant of the Marine Corps. Ira Hayes, one of the three surviving flag raisers depicted on the monument was also seated upfront with John Bradley (incorrectly identified as a flag raiser until June 2016), Rene Gagnon (incorrectly identified as a flag raiser until October 2019), Mrs. Goldie Price (Mother of Franklin Sousley), Mrs. Martha Strank, and Mrs. Ada Belle Block. Those giving remarks at the dedication included Robert Anderson, Chairman of Day; Colonel J.W. Moreau, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired), President, Marine Corps War Memorial Foundation; General Shepherd, who presented the memorial to the American people; Felix de Weldon; and Richard Nixon, who gave the dedication address. Inscribed on the memorial are the following words:

In Honor And Memory Of The Men of The United States Marine Corps Who Have Given Their Lives To Their Country Since 10 November 1775

Portrayal in film
In the 1961 film The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes, the fictional character James B. Sorenson (Hayes's Marine buddy in the movie), portrayed by actor James Franciscus, was a composite based primarily on Franklin Sousley.

In the 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers, about the six flag raisers on Iwo Jima, Franklin Sousley was portrayed by actor Joseph Michael Cross. The film is based on the 2000 book of the same title.

Military awards
Sousley's military decorations and awards:

 Rifle Expert Badge (BAR)
 Rifle Marksman Badge (M1)

Note: The Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal required 4 years service during the World War II time period.

Honors
There is a small Franklin Sousley memorial in the Fleming County Public Library, in Flemingsburg, Kentucky. Additionally in Flemingsburg, there is the Franklin Sousley Museum located at Camp Sousley.

The VA medical center in Lexington, Kentucky was renamed for Franklin R. Sousley in 2018.

See also

Marine Corps War Memorial
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
Shadow of Suribachi: Raising the Flags on Iwo Jima

References

External links

About Franklin Sousley at Camp Sousley

1925 births
1945 deaths
People from Fleming County, Kentucky
Military personnel from Kentucky
United States Marines
United States Marine Corps personnel killed in World War II
Battle of Iwo Jima
People notable for being the subject of a specific photograph
Articles containing video clips
Deaths by firearm in Japan


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UN panel: corporate tax avoidance is Africa's biggest financial drain
A UN panel led by former South African President Thabo Mbeki estimated that each year Africa loses twice as much money from illicit financial flows as it receives from foreign aid.
By Leslie Wayne
Can Thabo Mbeki, the second president in post-apartheid South Africa, help save the continent from the scourge of corruption and illicit money outflows? The United Nations seems to think so.
Mbeki is the public face of a UN-sponsored group – "The High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows" — that is in the process of drawing up what it says will be practical recommendations to end the flight of much-needed capital from Africa whether from outright corruption, criminal activities or, most significantly, tax avoidance schemes by multi-national corporations.
The target audience for the group's recommendations, which are to be issued next June, are fellow African leaders who will be provided with specific steps to follow and who, it is hoped, will be motivated to take action. Mbeki was in New York last week hosting a panel discussion with officials from various government agencies and non-profit groups to solicit their ideas. It was just one in a series of sessions that is taking Mbeki and his staff to Europe, where he will meet with OECD and European Union officials, to Washington, where the group met with Treasury, State and Justice department officials, and to Africa, where he has met with leaders of some nine countries.
At the New York event, Mbeki said that an estimated $50 billion a year seeps out of Africa through illicit capital outflows, which is twice as much as the amount of foreign aid the continent receives each year. "These are reserves that leave the country and end up somewhere else,'' said Mbeki. "Africa is deprived of $50 billion a year that it needs for economic challenges."
In the cross-hairs of the panel are multi-national corporations that extract resources or sell their goods and services in Africa while contributing little in the way of taxes or other forms of payments. Shell corporations, tax havens, complicated tax-avoidance schemes are the various tools used by multinational companies to whittle down their tax bill, in some cases, to zero, according to the group.
Other forms of financial outflows from Africa are well-known – corruption, bribery and embezzlement by local officials as well as such criminal activities such as trading in drugs, weapons and even people. Yet the group said these illicit activities pale when compared to the financial drainage caused by multinational corporations. In Kenya, for instance, expat companies have successfully operated for more than twenty years and managed to never show a taxable profit. Copper mines in Zambia have provided little revenue to the government and the Democratic Republic of Congo has no idea of much money multi-national companies are generating within its borders.
In some ways, Mbeki is saying the same thing about multi-national corporations that the bandit Willie Sutton said about banks: He's going after them because that is where the money is. Yet, even Mr. Mbeki admits, it is a challenging task. The question is simple: Do African nations have the technical expertise to confront sophisticated multi-national corporations and their platoons of accountants and attorneys with increasingly opaque ways of dodging their tax bill?
This is not only a problem in Africa. General Electric, for instance, has come under fire for parking so much money offshore that it lowered its U.S. tax rate to just 1.8 percent through most of the 2000's. The tax avoidance schemes of Apple, along with other tech companies, that shuffle money through a dizzying array of tax havens, have garnered global headlines, and some outrage.
Yet, General Electric and Apple are avoiding taxes to the U.S., the world's largest economy. In the case of Africa, it is the world's weakest economies that are deprived of tax revenue. A recent report by Action Aid, a British nonprofit that focuses on issues of global poverty, found, like the UN panel, that far more revenue was lost to Africa through tax avoidance schemes than it received in aid.
Action Aid also presented a case study of one multinational operating on the continent, SAB Miller, one of the world's largest brewers. In Ghana, for instance, SAB Miller sold up to $47 million in beer a year and yet, in many recent years, paid no taxes. In fact, Action Aid found that a Ghanaian roadside stand selling Miller-made beer paid more in taxes than brewer itself.
If the U.S. government is unable to wring more taxes from these multi-national corporations, it is an even taller order for African nations with limited technical expertise and weaker political systems. Mbeki said the issue of whether African nations "have the capacity to negotiate with multi-national corporations is a real one." In the Congo, Mbeki said, the government has no idea of how much copper is being exported from its mines. He added: "They don't even know how much they are losing.''
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Basically, it's Kaspersky Mobile Security 9 spruced up for tablets, with all the theft protection, call blocking, SMS, and other phone-specific features removed. It is kind of handy to have those superfluous features axed (except theft protection?) for the purpose of navigating the menus, but it seems like this app doesn't add much functionality over its phone counterpart, aside from a streamlined (and admittedly much better) home screen.
Basically, the app keeps all the anti-virus and malware protection found in Kaspersky Mobile Security and drops everything else, while putting on more tablet-appropriate attire. Still, Mobile Security isn't Honeycomb-compatible, so that's one (sort of shady) reason to get this tablet-specific iteration.
Kaspersky has said they plan to integrate tablet-specific theft protection and remote wipe features into later versions of the app.
You can pick up Kasperky Tablet Security from Kaspersky's website only at the moment, and it will run you $20 for a one-year subscription. A bit pricey considering the phone app runs you $10 for a lifetime of use, but we imagine Tablet Security will show up in the market sooner or later.


Kent County Levy Court Home Page - The official home page for the Kent county levy court in Kent county Delaware. Kent County Levy Court is your County government. The Levy Court is composed of seven elected Commissioners, six of whom are elected from the districts in which they reside and the seventh is elected at-large to represent the entire County. The Levy Court is the highest executive power that exists in Kent County, Delaware. It is charged with overseeing the daily operations of Kent County government. The Levy Court was established in 1655 when the Delaware General Assembly, then under Dutch control, enacted legislation that called for taxes to be levied on all land owners in Delaware.
http://co.kent.de.us/levy-court/1st-district-representative.aspx Levy Court Kent County - Kent County Levy Court is your County government. The Levy Court is composed of seven elected Commissioners, six of whom are elected from the districts in which they reside and the seventh is elected at-large to represent the entire County. The Levy Court is the highest executive power that exists in Kent County, Delaware. It is charged with overseeing the daily operations of Kent County government.
http://co.kent.de.us/administration-dept.aspx Administration Kent County - The Kent County Department of Administration consists of the County Administrator's Office, Information Technology Office, and Personnel Office. These offices support the seven elected Levy Court Commissioners as well as other County departments and elected County offices by administering all County functions relating to employees and infrastructure. The Department of Administration is headed by the County Administrator who is the chief appointed officer of the County. His duties include advising Levy Court Commissioners on issues affecting Kent County and managing the day to day operations of county government. The County Administrator supervises all appointed department managers, provides direct oversight for the Information Technology and Personnel offices, and coordinates the activities of all departments on behalf of Levy Court.
http://co.kent.de.us/levy-court/department-directory.aspx Department Directory Kent County Levy Court Delaware - Directory System for the Departments of the Kent County Levy Court in Delaware. Find Phone numbers and Email information for specific departments housed by the Levy Court.
http://co.kent.de.us/personnel/holiday-calendar.aspx Personnel Kent County - The Personnel Office is a strategic partner in the deployment and retention of high quality human resources among the six County departments and five elective offices. Specifically, the Office provides employee recruitment and selection services, payroll services, employee benefit procurement and claims resolution services, risk management services, employee training and skill development services, and employee records management services.
http://co.kent.de.us/newsroom.aspx Newsroom Kent County - News and Press Releases for the Kent County Levy Court located in Kent County Delaware.
http://co.kent.de.us/clerk-of-the-peace-office.aspx Clerk of the Peace Kent County - Kent County Clerk of the Peace. The Clerk of the Peace witnesses County documents; attends all formal Levy Court Meetings; records all acts as custodian for the Minutes of the Levy Court Meetings; advertises and posts County ordinances; countersigns warrants drawn on County funds. Issues marriage and civil union licenses; and performs marriage and civil union ceremonies.
http://co.kent.de.us/sheriffs-office.aspx Sheriff's Office Kent County - Sheriff's Office for the Kent County Levy Court. The function of the Sheriff's Office is to service Kent County by performing many functions for the State of Delaware Courts (Superior Court, Court of Common Pleas, District Courts and Court in Chancery) and U.S. Courts. The Sheriff's Office serves legal notices (subpoenas, levies, summons, etc.) Additionally, the Sheriff's Office sells real estate in accordance with the Delaware Code.
http://co.kent.de.us/recorder-of-deeds-office.aspx Recorder of Deeds Kent County - Recorder of Deeds Kent County Levy Court. The Mission of the Recorder of Deeds Office is to Serve the People of Kent County by correctly recording and indexing documents in a timely and efficient manner, by courteously responding to requests for help and information, by collecting and properly accounting for the appropriate fees and taxes, and by providing every employee with motivation, training, and experience so that each one can enjoy progressing toward a higher level as a skilled and productive worker.
http://co.kent.de.us/register-of-wills-office.aspx Register of Wills Kent County - Register of Wills Kent County Levy Court. The Register of Wills Office records wills after death and other documents pertaining to estate matters in Kent County, Delaware. The Office is responsible for overseeing the appointments of personal representatives and for administering estate proceedings. This office is also held accountable for making sure that the estate is in compliance with the Delaware law and Kent County policies. All estate matters are maintained as permanent records.
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I needed a stroller that I could close one-handed (the other hand is holding my one-yr-old's hand). This is not it.


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For a 'small' town, Hattiesburg has plenty of big city buildings
I've always been a lover of great architecture. That love grew out of my childhood fascination with skyscrapers.
Way back in the day, when World Book Encyclopedia was the closest thing we had to the Internet, I'd spend hours sitting at my family's dining room table, combing through its pages reading about big cities, marveling at photos of their skylines.
To this day, show me a photo of any major American city and I can immediately tell you the city, based on its collection of skyscrapers.
Tall buildings will always be my favorite, followed closely by another form of towering structures, church steeples.
Whenever I visit cities like New York City or Chicago, though the modern glass and steel towers are impressive, it's the older, more ornate skyscrapers that thrill me most.
I can't help but notice how the summits of early skyscrapers often resemble cathedrals. They exude a religious feel all their own, like churches for the business world.
Smaller cities, like Hattiesburg, aren't known for tall buildings.
Those few multi-story buildings we do have are concentrated downtown, the University of Southern Mississippi campus and the midtown area, including Forrest General Hospital's medical center.
We have no towering skyscrapers, but the towers of some of Hattiesburg's church steeples make up for it, providing impressive and spiritual eye candy as they reach for the sky.
Downtown Hattiesburg has several of our area's most inspirational steeples.
My personal favorite is Main Street United Methodist Church, one of the oldest in the city. I attended grade school at the historic Eureka Elementary School.
From Mrs. Lewis' 6th grade class on the second floor, I could see Main Street Methodist's steeple. It was then, as it is now, a beautiful complement to our little downtown skyline.
I've always admired this local icon, as it echoes the Campanile bell tower of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, Italy.
For me, Main Street United Methodist is one of the finest pieces of architecture in Hattiesburg.
Bay Street Presbyterian Church, dating back to 1906, is the oldest church in the city.
Its towering white steeple demands admiration as you approach, driving south on Main Street.
Having maintained its historic location for over 100 years, Bay Street Presbyterian was built in what was then considered, believe it or not, the "south side" of Hattiesburg.
Sacred Heart Catholic Church, another Hattiesburg landmark, has also remained downtown.
The church and its grade school, for decades, have been important and appreciated anchors for our city center.
Worth noting, Sacred Heart includes Spanish-speaking services, for Hattiesburg's growing Latino population.
When First Baptist Church vacated its historic home on Pine Street, it joined the westward migration of several of the city's large, historically white congregations.
Thankfully, Sacred Heart stepped in, keeping the building in the hands of a church. The former First Baptist campus now serves as home for Sacred Heart's high school.
When I was a child, African-Americans were not welcome at First Baptist Church, nor, for that matter, at most of the city's white congregations.
That didn't stop me from loving its magnificent steeple. My mother was a very spiritual woman.
On her way cross town to Mary Bethune Elementary School, where she was principal for several years, she once shared with me how seeing the First Baptist steeple was her morning inspiration as she drove to work. I think of my mother every time I pass the church.
Driving north on Pine Street, First Baptist's, now the Sacred Heart steeple, is reminiscent of Boston's historic Old North Church. The church spire provides a spiritual exclamation point for the entry into downtown Hattiesburg, poetically framing the skyline.
In Hattiesburg's newly minted midtown area, Westminster Presbyterian Church's steeple is another inspirational sight, approaching from either direction on U.S. 49. But the most dramatic view of the church would be driving east on Hardy Street.
The fearsome tornado of 2013 trekked through the west side of metro Hattiesburg before leaping across I-59.
On the east side of the freeway, the tornado caused serious damage to several buildings on the University of Southern Mississippi campus, and to that of Westminster Presbyterian's as well. Thankfully, no one was hurt as a result of the storm.
Sadly though, a few of the stately oak trees on the Southern Miss campus fell victim to the storm, but ironically, we were left with a gift in return.
Driving east on Hardy Street, approaching campus, we're now blessed with an uninterrupted view of Westminster Presbyterian's stately steeple, rising triumphantly above the tree line, in spite of the storm.
Woodland Presbyterian Church is another one of my personal favorites, located at 40th Avenue and Lincoln Road.
I'm lucky enough to be inspired by its beauty daily, the church being an elegant focal point for my neighborhood.
Woodland is relatively new, compared to those older church sanctuaries downtown.
It was designed by local architect Larry Albert, who also designed the Library for Hattiesburg and Forrest County on Hardy Street.
Here's an interesting aside to the church's history. Woodland was established by families from two downtown churches, Bay Street Presbyterian and the historic First Presbyterian Church, now home to Truelight Baptist Church on Main Street.
Mr. Albert incorporated design elements from the older churches into his new design.
Woodland Presbyterian is presently undergoing a major remodel.
The steeple and sanctuary, postmodern beauties, are being completely reworked, adding the warmth of brick to its exterior. But oh, that inspiring steeple.
Originally coated in an off-white stucco, the steeple paid homage to its older sibling, Bay Street Presbyterian.
The steeple has been reclothed, adding the warmth of brick. Punctuated by nighttime illumination, its new brick skin tastefully marries the natural scenery, those majestic and towering pine trees (our other "skyscrapers") that define Hattiesburg.
I can't talk about church steeples without mentioning the one atop my home church, Mt. Olive Baptist Church, on Country Club Road.
My grandfather and namesake, Rev. Elijah L. Jones, was pastor at Mt. Olive for many years.
A carpenter by trade, Rev. Jones helped construct the church's older sanctuary.
As the church continued to grow, Mt. Olive has built a larger, more modern sanctuary, added on to the older building.
When Mt. Olive's new sanctuary was in its planning stages, our congregation did not want to leave the church's historic roots in south Hattiesburg.
That feeling was echoed by our pastor, Rev. Arthur Siggers. In fact, he once shared his dream with me: that when busloads of children were riding to school or walking past the new church during its construction, it sent a message to them.
The Hattiesburg area has experienced phenomenal growth over the past few decades. But Rev. Siggers and our congregation wanted those children to see physical and spiritual growth, taking place right there in their own backyards.
When I lived on Fairley Street in east Hattiesburg, in my mother's house, one thing was understood. (There was no discussion.)
You knew Sunday mornings meant getting up, donning your church clothes and walking to Sunday School.
That's when you could still get to church walking on foot. (Maybe some of you remember?)
In those days, churches were built into actual neighborhoods, rather than being backed up against asphalt, surrounded by shopping mall-sized parking lots, like they are today.
I grew up at the historic Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, the oldest African-American congregation in the city, when it was still located on Mobile Street.
On Sunday mornings following services, church members would spill out onto Mobile Street.
The adults would mingle and talk while we kids joked with each other before our afternoon walks home for dinner and playtime. Back then, Mobile Street was alive, filled with businesses owned and operated by African-Americans.
It was like our own little downtown.
Hattiesburg seemed like such a big city to me back then.
Oh sure, I had my World Book Encyclopedia to read when I got home, admiring the skylines of much bigger cities. But from the sidewalk in front of Mt. Carmel, where we gathered after church on Sunday mornings, I could forget about those big-city skylines. From the corner of Mobile and 7th streets, I could see Hattiesburg's own little skyscrapers.
There was the former Forrest Hotel, Ross Building, Carter Building and the now-lost 5-story Citizens Bank "tower." (Hey, it was a tower to me.)
Our handful of tall buildings were skyscrapers enough for this country boy from Mississippi.
I've lived in and visited much larger cities since my childhood, so I've seen plenty of real skyscrapers. But long before those towers of commerce were built, churches, with their steeples, were the tallest buildings in many American cities, Hattiesburg being no exception.
Our city's churches where then, as they are now, towering inspirations of their own, as their steeples reach for the sky.
But wait.
Since they are churches, let's say as their steeples reach - for Heaven.
Elijah Jones is a writer and a proud graduate of the Hattiesburg Public School System and the University of Southern Mississippi. Send him an email at: edjhubtown@aol.com.
Scheffler tied for lead after rocky finish to third round


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Editorial, Feature
nonsite.org - Editorial - Feature
The Real Problem with Selma
It doesn't help us understand the civil rights movement, the regime it challenged, or even the significance of the voting rights act
By Adolph Reed, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania)
The only thing that hasn't changed about black politics since 1965 is how we think about it.
—Willie Legette (ca. 1999)
Ava Du Vernay's film Selma has generated yet another wave of mass mediated debate over cinematic representation of black Americans' historical experience of racial injustice. The controversy's logic is at this point familiar, nearly clichéd. Du Vernay and others have responded to complaints about the film's historical accuracy, particularly in its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson, with invocations of artistic license and assertions that the film is not intended as historical scholarship. However, even Maureen Dowd recognizes the contradiction at the core of those claims. "The 'Hey, it's just a movie' excuse doesn't wash. Filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season."1 And that contradiction, as I've noted ["Django Unchained, or, The Help"], permeates the dizzyingly incoherent and breathtakingly shallow pop controversies spawned by recent films dramatizing either the black experience of slavery or the southern Jim Crow order.
Notwithstanding their boosters' claims about these films' relation to the historical moments they depict, Selma and its recent predecessors, like other period dramas, treat the past like a props closet, a source of images that facilitate naturalizing presentist sensibilities by dressing them up in the garb of bygone days. And the specific sensibilities that carry the spate of slavery/Jim Crow-era costume dramas are those around which the contemporary black professional-managerial class (PMC) converges: reduction of politics to a narrative of racial triumph that projects "positive images" of black accomplishment, extols exemplary black individuals, stresses overcoming great adversity to attain success and recognition, and inscribes a monolithic and transhistorical racism as the fundamental obstacle confronting, and thus uniting, all black Americans. History is beside the point for this potted narrative, as is art incidentally, which the debate over the relative merits of Spielberg's Lincoln and Tarantino's Django Unchained demonstrates. The only metric that could make comparing such radically different films seem plausible is the presence or prominence of a black hero or black "agency."
Du Vernay threw the cat out of the bag in discussing her characterization of Johnson's role in the struggle for the VRA. The original script portrayed the president as more centrally engaged and actively supportive but, she says, "I wasn't interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma." Of course, her film doesn't follow through on that pious declaration; she avoids the white savior but only to replace him with a black one. Selma is, despite her insistence that it isn't, another iteration of King idolatry.2 But the "white-savior" comment is helpful because it makes clear that representing history is not the point of these films. As English literature professor Jerome Christensen contends in a defense of the film's relation to history, "Selma is not education, it's mobilization—it's a movie that wants to move you. Its aim is not accuracy, but to be tragically and poignantly clever." He goes on to assert: "That movie is Ferguson…Nothing has changed. That's why Johnson in some sense can't be the hero of the movie. He can't be the white savior, because nothing was saved."3 Similarly, in articulating what offends her about Maureen Dowd's criticism, the perpetually affronted Gender & Women's Studies and Africana Studies professor Brittney Cooper declares, "a new racial lens is exactly what America needs. In Selma, we learn what films look like when directors and cinematographers who love and respect black people turn their gaze on us. Selma artfully displaces a white gaze, and it is the unnamed and unsettling anxiety that sits at the heart of so many of the critiques of the film."4
From that perspective Selma isn't really about the campaign for voting rights at all; as Christensen says, it's mobilization and what it's mobilization for are above all the status claims precisely of the black PMC, here embodied by black filmmakers and actors and, presumably, the parasitic chatterers who bloviate about them. That helps to understand why the ersatz political debate about the film shifted so smoothly into arguments that its director and actors had been "snubbed" for Oscar nominations as well as why the alleged snub is represented as an injustice against black Americans writ large—i.e., not simply the individuals who might have been nominated. In a perverse revision of the old norm of labor solidarity, "an injury to one is an injury to all," now it's the black (haute) bourgeoisie that suffers injustice on behalf of the black masses. It's prominent black individuals' interests and aspirations that are asserted—under the flag of positive images, role models, equivalent vulnerability to racism, and other such class-inflected bullshit—as crucial concerns for the race as a whole. To be sure, this isn't a new phenomenon, not even in the imaginations of post-blaxploitation era black filmmakers. Tim Reid's 1995 period film, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, adapted from a black conservative's lovingly nostalgic memoir of growing up in the Mississippi Delta region between the late 1940s and early 1960s, fabricates an incident in which the mass of impoverished and brutalized black sharecroppers rise not to protest their own circumstances—abrogation of citizenship rights, discrimination, lynching, or exploitation in the cotton economy—but to support a black icehouse operator whose white competitors were conspiring to put him out of business.5 This is pure class fantasy.
Much of the debate that Selma has sparked about the relation between artistic license and commitment to historical accuracy rests on terms that are too formalistic to be useful. It doesn't make sense to talk about the limits of creative license, especially for a narrative that purports to historical or political significance, unless the critique is linked both to the narrative's focal arc—the specific story the artist wants to tell and how—and to assessment of the ideological commitments and potential impact of that narrative. One objection to Du Vernay's depiction of Johnson as resistant to pursuing a voting rights law is that it is an unacceptable expression of creative license because: 1) it falsifies the history of the civil rights movement in a way that 2) egregiously distorts a significant element of that history and 3) in doing so, leaves an erroneous picture of how the key victories of the civil rights movement were won that moreover 4) can have counterproductive implications for how we think about political strategy today. In addition to those who defend the film on grounds I've discussed, others have acknowledged its consequential misrepresentations but nonetheless conclude that on balance, even with those faults, the film makes a significant contribution in telling even a flawed version of the story of the Selma campaign to a popular audience. Albert R. Hunt, after critically discussing the substance and implications of the film's treatment of Johnson, rejects Joseph A. Califano's urging not to see the film. Hunt concludes, "You should see this movie, and know the story of Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. That was brought home to me by my 25-year-old apolitical daughter, Lauren: 'Seeing it is a lot different than reading about it.'"6
But what does Selma communicate? Does its vision of the Selma campaign as a dramatic event, as much an existential as a political triumph, contribute to making sense of the sources and goals of the civil rights movement, the pursuit of voting rights enforcement, or the relation of either to contemporary problems bearing on race and inequality? If we're reporting on how our children responded to it, my son, who is an historian, commented at the beginning of the controversy about Johnson's role that it's only a matter of time before students show up in his undergraduate courses rehearsing the wrong-headed common sense understanding they'd acquired from the movie or discussions of it. Or, for that matter, from professors of Africana Studies, or English or (for sure) Cultural Studies. Under these conditions, maybe the most pertinent response to Du Vernay's film is to lay out an historically richer and thicker account of the struggle for voting rights enforcement and the impact of the VRA on the South, black politics and American politics in general over the half-century since its passage.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), of course, was one of the crowning achievements of the high period of southern black political insurgency that began in the late 1940s and accelerated through the early 1960s. The story of the heroic popular protest campaign, culminating in the violent "Bloody Sunday" Selma march, which created the political environment securing the bill's passage is well known. The most recent irruption of recurrent attempts to undermine voting rights—via the panoply of efforts to stifle voter registration and actual voting, to dilute voting strength through manipulating reapportionment to pack, stack, or disperse concentrations of targeted groups, and finally through direct attack on the VRA itself7—only underscore how successful that law has been in democratizing American society. And that success extends beyond opening opportunities for black or Latino candidates to win office or even for black and Latino voters to register their preferences directly. It has substantially altered the political culture of the region as well as the country as a whole.
After open Nazi/Klansman (take your pick; he wore both swastika and hood) David Duke had received a majority of white votes in both the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race and a US Senate race a year earlier, I was asked to comment on whether his appeal was a lamentable testament to how little things had changed in southern politics. My response was that his overall performance in those two elections was rather an illustration of the significance of the VRA. Twenty-five years earlier, if Duke had gotten solid majorities of the white vote, he'd have been elected. And that is not just a simple arithmetical point about the additive force of the black vote. That by the dawn of the 1990s more than two-fifths of white Louisiana voters had no trouble voting for candidates actively supported by a vast majority of black voters marks a more significant sea change. That deeper shift in political culture and the potential it implies for pursuit of a transformatively progressive politics is also a reason that the reactionary alliance of fascist agitators, racist and other lunatics and the corporate interests that fund them have become so hell bent on undoing voting rights.
In fact, the contemporary campaign of disfranchisement looks a lot like its predecessor at the end of the 19th century, and that similarity should remind us that the VRA did not so much extend the franchise to black southerners as restore it. Many of us no doubt find in our teaching that, for undergraduates in particular, black American political history is a seamless blur from slavery to Jim Crow and that, notwithstanding a lot of gestural references to black people's "agency," students have no sense of the impact of the Fifteenth Amendment in opening a generation of active and impressive political participation.8 The campaign for disfranchisement that intensified in the 1890s was the direct outcropping of the dominant merchant-planter class's concerns that blacks and white poor farmers and workers could align to challenge ruling class power. That was not a Freudian compensatory fantasy. Enough evidence existed even before the Populist insurgency of the 1890s to sustain those concerns. In Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Jack Bloom describes the context that underlay white elites' fears. The insurgent Readjuster movement in Virginia won statewide office in 1879 on an alliance of black freedmen and white workers and farmers. More than 60,000 black people across the region belonged to the Knights of Labor, and they made up a majority of the Knights' 3,000 members in Mississippi. The Colored Farmers Alliance, linked to the Populist movement, boasted more than 1,250,000 members. Most dramatically, a North Carolina Populist-Republican Fusion ticket swept statewide in 1894, including most of the major cities, and was re-elected in 1896. Tellingly, the Fusion government was overturned in 1898 in a white supremacist putsch conducted by Democratic elites.9
As J. Morgan Kousser indicates, the aggressive campaign of disfranchisement that took place in the 1890s and early 1900s, while certainly fueled and justified by racism, was about disciplining white poor farmers and workers as well as eliminating black voting.10 Removing blacks from the electoral equation forced poor and working-class whites to define their political aspirations in terms that presumed the absolute hegemony of the merchant-planter-industrialist class. In his classic study, Southern Politics in State and Nation, V. O. Key argued that plebeian whites were able to win in the political order thus produced not much more than the trappings of nominal white supremacy. That's all the "southern exceptionalism"—successful disfranchisement (and, after all, northern elites tried and largely failed to disfranchise lower-class whites as well)—necessary to explain why the center of gravity of the region's politics has been distinctively reactionary. That absolute ruling class dominance meant, for example, that southern trade unionists could not count on significant support from state and local elected officials when they attempted to organize in the 1920s and 1930s with predictable consequences. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case.
I mention the dynamics and consequences of disfranchisement for three reasons: 1) I believe it is important to stress the fact that black people openly and enthusiastically exercised citizenship rights for decades after Emancipation; 2) noting those facets of the historical context underscores the broad significance of both the franchise and its loss, and 3) it is also important to recognize that what most crucially connects successful disfranchisement at the beginning of the 20th century and contemporary efforts is not so much an invariant, transhistorical "racism" (though there has been no shortage of racist argument and targeting involved in each instance) but a very pragmatic attempt by powerful elites to shrivel the electorate to solidify partisan advantages for their narrow programs of upward redistribution. Black people, that is, were targets of disfranchisement in the earlier moment as much as a Republican-Populist voting bloc as because they were black, just as today's disfranchisement efforts target blacks and Latinos as Democratic voters. Keeping that in mind may help to neutralize some of the pointless banter about whether black teabagger darlings like South Carolina's Tim Scott are embodied evidence that that reactionary element is not racist or are merely tokens and dupes and/or lunatics. (I got hit with a deluge of threats and denunciations—more than 350 hate emails in a couple of days—from right-wingers affronted by a very mild, milquetoast even, New York Times op-ed on the significance of Scott's appointment to fill out the term of Jim Demint, which concluded that Scott's appointment did not have any larger historical significance but should be understood entirely in relation to partisan jockeying for position in contemporary South Carolina politics and rhetorical posturing in the most ephemeral national political chatter.11) That is not an argument that can be resolved—one side alleges racism, the other denies it—and is moreover not really the point.
Many activists struggled to challenge the post-Populist disfranchisement without much success until the changed national political climate—itself in part a product of increased black voting strength outside the South—opened institutional opportunities. In 1944, for example, the Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Allwright invalidated the Texas white primary, which had defined the state's Democratic Party as a private club and therefore legally able to restrict membership to whites, and subsequent cases extended the ruling to white primaries in other states. This ushered in the beginnings of a shift in southern politics. Between 1938 and 1946 black voter registration in the region trebled to more than 600,000. Henry Lee Moon reported that the increases were "most spectacular" in the cities. In 1946 alone black registration increased in Atlanta from 5,000 to 25,000; 1,200 to 20,000 in Savannah GA; 2,500 to 15,000 in Jacksonville, FL. New Orleans recorded a similarly dramatic increase, from roughly 400 black voters in 1940 to more than 28,000 by 1952.12 These dramatic increases in black voting, however, could not translate into much beyond clientelist politics because black voting strength was generally restricted to cities and even there was not a large enough bloc to support pressing more aggressively to shape policy agendas.
Passage of the VRA opened new electoral possibilities in both urban and rural, especially black belt, areas. These new possibilities showed up in exponential increases in black office holding, from fewer than 1,500 nationally in 1970 to nearly 8,900 in 1998. For the first time since the Reconstruction era, black candidates in the South were elected sheriffs and other city and county officials and to state legislatures. (Selma concludes with a mostly triumphal montage of freeze-frames of selected individual participants in the events with captions indicating aspects of their future lives. Sheriff Jim Clark appears with the note that he was voted out of office in the next election. It struck me that that suggests one prosaic, material reason for his intransigent opposition to black enfranchisement—knowledge that he would lose his job.13) The ranks of black elected officials outside the South grew substantially as well, and the most visible expressions of the new possibilities were the increased numbers of black congressional representatives and the emergence of a phalanx of big-city mayors. The number of blacks in Congress grew from 9 in 1969 to 43 in 2013. By the mid-1980s, what I characterized as black urban regimes—i.e., "black-led and black- dominated administrations backed by solid council majorities," a formulation intended to distinguish racial transitions in local governing coalitions from instances of black mayors like Tom Bradley in Los Angeles or Wellington Webb in Denver who won office as representatives of electoral coalitions in which nonwhites were not a majority—governed in thirteen U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more.14 Many more were elected in smaller cities, typically near-in suburbs that had become largely black in population.
These transformations in black officialdom were widely lauded, understandably, as fulfillment of the victories of the civil rights insurgency. After all, the early waves of the new black elected officials included many with either civil rights, federal Office of Economic Opportunity Community Action or Model Cities experience.15 Moreover, not only was the new stratum of black officials and functionaries directly the product of civil rights and Black Power activism; the election campaigns that propelled the racial transition typically draped themselves in the raiment of popular civil rights insurgency, and candidates commonly presented themselves as embodying the next phase of the victorious movement. Such élan was likely unavoidable in that heady moment. However, as is often the case in politics, the story was more complicated than that.
I laid out an argument in the late 1980s that making sense of the racial transition within which the black urban regimes were constituted required examination of the structural and institutional contexts within which transition occurred. In particular, I focused on the significance, in addition to insurgent black political activity, of metropolitan demographic and political-economic reorganization during the decades after World War II. I argued that, for black urban governance at least, two contradictions were crucial to understand: 1) the political-economic conditions that enabled their emergence, including the fiscal stress characteristic to largely minority municipalities, also undercut those regimes' capacities to undertake courses of action that would address the downwardly redistributive concerns shared disproportionately among the largely minority electoral coalition and 2) the governing coalitions on which those regimes depend are preemptively weighted toward the pro-growth elites who are committed to programs of aggressive upward redistribution predicated largely on suppressing or preempting the downward redistribution to which the electoral coalition is disposed. I examined Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson's effort in the 1970s to harmonize the latter contradiction in the case of an airport construction controversy by concocting a notion of black political interest that linked it to one of the contending developers' proposal.16 Other scholars have made similar arguments about the limits and contradictions of black urban governance—for example, among urbanists, Clarence Stone's and Claude Barnes's work on Atlanta, Dennis Judd's on Denver, Stephen Samuel Smith on Charlotte, Bryan Jones and Lynn Bachelor on Detroit, William E. Nelson on Cleveland, and Robert Smith among students of black politics.17 This scholarship identified structural and ideological tensions but for the most part did not examine closely the fine dynamics of legitimation—the material substance of political incorporation—that linked the new black political class to its governing and electoral bases and in the process articulated a new black politics materially rooted in new opportunity structures that were compatible with elaboration of a privatized and market-driven politics that eventually would become hegemonic as neoliberalism.
More recently a very interesting scholarship has shown the extent to which racial transition in urban politics characteristically was anchored in alliances between insurgent black activists and functionaries and a rising stratum of aggressively pro-growth liberals. John David Arena's Driven from New Orleans, a study of the forty-year attack on low-income public housing in New Orleans, shows in wonderful detail how from its beginning the racial transition that began in the late 1960s in that city was tied to an urban liberalism that was also the cornerstone of the new, rationalized tourist economy and a broader program of targeting public resources to support rent-intensifying development. Arena examines the nexus of racial transition in local government and an emergent black political class, the policy content of post-segregation era racial liberalism, and the roles of philanthropic foundations and neighborhood groups in consolidating and legitimating that developmentalist regime via discourses of grassroots authenticity. Timothy Weaver discusses the emergence of black governance in Philadelphia as a product of a similar coalition. Kent Germany examines the key role of local administration of War on Poverty and Great Society funds in formation of the institutional architecture of racial transition in New Orleans as well as its intricate connections with the emerging racial and growth liberalism in the 1960s, and Megan French-Marcelin studies the role of the Community Development Block Grant program and other federal economic development aid in cementing interracial growth liberalism in New Orleans in the 1970s and 1980s.18
Among its other contributions, this literature throws into relief what is problematic about a common interpretive tendency in the fields of black politics, black American political history, and black studies generally to posit as a central critical analytical category an idealized "black liberation movement," "black freedom movement," or "black community" that in effect exists outside or logically and normatively prior to larger political dynamics in American society and political economy. In positing a false coherence, this interpretive posture, which has its roots, as Cedric Johnson's and Dean Robinson's work shows definitively, in Black Power and post-Black Power communitarian radicalism, has been problematic—I'd argue counterproductive—in both scholarly and civic domains. From its earliest iterations as a leftist or racial populist critique of the limitations of Black Power as ideology and program, going back to the end of the 1960s in Robert L. Allen's Black Awakening in Capitalist America and to some extent Harold Cruse's critiques of Black Power ideology,19 that interpretive posture preempted recognizing how emergence of a stratum of public functionaries and aspirants had the potential to alter radically the practical universe of the political for black Americans across the board, from the most mundane aspects of quotidian life on up to larger questions of the nature and direction of public policy at all levels.
Such analytical purblindness was understandable at that historical moment both because the new political regime had not begun to take concrete shape and because the rhetorical force of the struggles against racial exclusion and discrimination reasonably presumed a collective or unitary and popular black interest in opposing racism and racially discriminatory treatment. Furthermore, the popularity of anticolonial metaphor gave a radical patina to formulations of black Americans as a singular "People." As a standard of critical judgment, however, that perspective was never adequate for the interpretive or political challenges presented by the evolving post-segregation order or the revanchist turn in national politics begun in the 1970s and its many ramifications down to states and cities and the lives of all working people as that political turn consolidated on bipartisan terms and intensified over subsequent decades. (Political scientist Alex Willingham, in an article originally published in 1975, was probably the first to articulate a clear understanding of the limits of black radical ideology in this regard.20) It can lead only to dead-end arguments—the parallel to pointless debates about whether or not some individual or stance is racist—about whether individual or program X really represents the interests of the black community or is a "sell out" or inauthentic.
In our current political moment, in which even flamboyantly race-conscious black people embrace career opportunities and ideological rationales attendant to the destruction of public education, privatization of public goods and services, and the dynamic of rent-intensifying real estate development commonly described as gentrification or neighborhood upgrading and revitalization, formulations that presume an idealized "black community" or "black masses" as a collective political subject obscure the real processes through which the larger revanchist regime gains legitimacy among black officials and citizens as its imperatives take on the character of pragmatic common sense. An extreme, or extremely ironic, illustration of this accommodation is Howard Fuller, once also known as Owusu Sadaukai, who was a legendary Black Power radical in North Carolina, a key figure in 1970s Pan-Africanism, then a Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thinking trade union activist. Some time after returning to his Milwaukee hometown, Fuller became the city's school superintendent and established a reputation as a teachers' union foe, and is now the founding eminence of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the main black pro-voucher, pro-charter, militantly anti-teachers union organization. However, dramatic cases of radicals' apparent conversion are less meaningful than are the many, far more insidious instances of following "natural" trajectories along a track of NGO-driven "community activism," as Arena describes, or other forms of "doing well by doing good" that lead precocious undergraduates to Teach For America and other organizations of neoliberalism's Jungvolk. Similarly precocious public officials like Cory Booker or Barack Obama insistently define racial aspirations—indeed all concerns with social justice—in line with the interests of financial capitalism, and many, many others all down the pyramid of social standing and power also imagine individual futures and "success" in savoring fantasies of pursuing personal advantage by operating within what a broader perspective reveals are the structures of neoliberal dispossession. An interpretive posture that posits an unproblematic "black community" or "black masses" as a normative standard cannot adequately conceptualize the relatively autonomous tendencies toward neoliberal legitimation in black politics; much less can it confront them politically.
This may be a reason that, as Cedric Johnson and I have complained to each other about since 2006, anti-racist activists focused their political outrage and calls for national action, including mobilization for mass marches, on a racial incident in Jena, Louisiana that was little more than a high school fight yet were incapable of, if not uninterested in, mounting any systematic or coherent action to protest the ongoing travesty of forced displacement and criminal inaction affecting hundreds of thousands of people little more than a three-hour drive away in post-Katrina New Orleans. Jena fit comfortably into a historically familiar frame of stereotypically southern small town racism/antiracism; the political and interpretive tools available in antiracist discourse did not work so cleanly in New Orleans.
Fortunately, recent years have also seen the appearance of a scholarly literature that actively investigates differentiation and class tensions within black politics, both in contemporary life and in the Jim Crow era when presumptions of unproblematic racial unity made more sense empirically. In addition to the work of Arena, Marcelin, Johnson and Robinson I've already mentioned, Preston Smith's Racial Democracy in the Black Metropolis is a study of intraracial tensions and conflict in housing politics in postwar Chicago; Michelle Boyd's Jim Crow Nostalgia examines a black on black gentrification initiative and attendant political dynamics on Chicago's South Side in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Touré Reed's Not Alms but Opportunity examines the class character and contradictions within the National Urban League and its Chicago and New York branches' programmatic approaches to the organization's articulated goal of racial uplift over its first forty years. The collection Renewing Black Intellectual History presents a set of case studies that exemplify the benefits of an approach that proceeds from presumption that political processes, differentiation, and structurally rooted antagonisms do not begin at the boundaries of the black American population and have been integral in shaping black Americans' politics no less than any other.21
So, to conclude this rumination on the VRA, I should note that, while my discussion of the resultant evolution of black politics has focused on the emergence of a new urban regime, similar conclusions can be drawn about other domains as well, from the Congressional Black Caucus, to state legislative politics. In fact, Prof. Willie Legette, a political scientist at South Carolina State University whose extraordinarily apt aphorism begins this essay, and I began in the early years of the current century a running, admittedly somewhat tribalist as well as jocular, discussion about whether the South Carolina black political class or its Louisiana counterpart is the worst—most feckless, least imaginative, most self-serving, capitulationist, venal and time-serving—in the country. (All in all, I suspect that the real answer is a variation of my father's assessment of state legislatures across the board—i.e., that the worst one in the country is the one presiding in the state where you are at the moment.) What initiated our discussion was the nearly simultaneous performance of the South Carolina black legislative caucus in the Confederate flag controversy that erupted in 1999 and Louisiana black Democrats' immediate supplication to reactionary Republican Governor Mike Foster, described during his first campaign as "David Duke without the sheet" and who ran on a pledge to complete the work that his grandfather Murphy J. Foster—who not only propounded the call for the 1898 disfranchising state constitutional convention that reduced black voting by more than 90% but also sent in the militia to break the New Orleans general strike—had begun in his eight years as governor.
What we have observed then and subsequently, however, is ultimately a natural entailment of the VRA, insofar as it facilitated black Americans' participation in the routine arrangements of American politics. That remains a significant victory of the civil rights movement. Election of a black sheriff in Madison Parish, Louisiana, not only democratized police-community relations; it also was an element in facilitating black incorporation into other opportunity structures unavailable under the regime anchored by disfranchisement. The VRA has contributed to altering political and social life in the region in other progressive ways as well. It has also contributed significantly to altering the character of black politics, in addition to ways I've already mentioned, by throwing into relief the fact that the interests of black elected officials and the black political class in general are not necessarily isomorphic with those of a "black community," no more than is the case with respect to any politicians and their constituents in the American political system. Their limitations underscore, or should, the fact that electoral politics is a domain, albeit a necessary one, for consolidating and institutionalizing victories that have been won on the plane of social movement struggle. In that sense the victory condensed in the forms of participation enabled by the VRA is necessary—a politics that does not seek institutional consolidation is ultimately no politics at all—but not sufficient for facing the challenges that confront us in this moment of rampant capitalist offensive against social justice, but neither are the essentially nostalgic modalities of protest politics often proposed as more authentic than the mundane electoral domain. It is past time to consider Prof. Legette's aphorism and engage its many implications. And that includes a warrant to resist the class-skewed penchant for celebrating victories won in the heroic moment of the southern civil rights movement as museum pieces disconnected from subsequent black American political history and the broad struggle for social justice and equality.
1.Maureen Dowd, "Not Just a Movie," New York Times, January 17, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/not-just-a-movie.html?_r=0.↑
2.Du Vernay's vision of the local movement doesn't extend much beyond King and his SCLC confederates at all. Glen Ford rightly criticizes Selma's characterization of the SNCC radicals' relation with King and SCLC. Du Vernay reduces the tension to an expression of some of the SNCC activists' ultimately petty and juvenile turf-protectiveness. Political or strategic differences are beyond her purview. While license is what it is, and the SNCC/SCLC tension is arguably not crucial to the story she wants to tell, her choice to portray James Forman in particular as a young, narrow-minded hothead may be as revealing as it is gratuitous and inaccurate. Forman was one of the most systematically leftist voices in SNCC, a Korean War veteran, a former teacher and organizer before going to join SNCC and was actually a year older than King. Du Vernay's film describes King as having "led the Civil Rights movement for thirteen years" until his assassination in 1968. That view is consistent with her trivialization of SNCC; it is also in no way correct. King, for example, was not even the principal force driving or the main attraction at the 1963 March on Washington, which was most of all the project of A. Philip Randolph and his Negro American Labor Council. See, for example, William P. Jones, "The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class," Labor 7 (2010): 33-52 and The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). In fact, I know several people who attended the march and left before King spoke because it was a long, hot day, and he was at that point in the minds of many activists just another preacher, albeit a courageous and progressive one. Forman provides an interesting, while clearly partisan, account of the ongoing SNCC/SCLC tension and its grounding, at least from a SNCC perspective, in his The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (New York: Macmillan, 1972). Ironically, in light of Du Vernay's depiction of a resistant if not hostile Lyndon Johnson, Forman's criticism of SCLC's role in the Selma campaign hinges precisely on its surreptitious alliance with the Johnson administration throughout the campaign (441-42).↑
3.Quoted in Cara Buckley, "When Films and Facts Collide in Questions," New York Times, January 21, 2015.↑
4.Brittney Cooper, "Maureen Dowd's Clueless White Gaze: What's Really Behind the Selma Backlash," salon.com, January 21, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/01/21/maureen_dowds_clueless_white_gaze_whats_really_behind_the_selma_backlash/.↑
5.The memoir on which the film is based is Clifton Taulbert, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored (New York: Penguin, 1995). Taulbert's memoir discusses the iceman, his Uncle Cleve, but reports no such incident. I discuss the memoir and film and this particular exercise of artistic license in "Romancing Jim Crow: Black Nostalgia for a Segregated Past," Village Voice, April 16, 1996, reprinted in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: New Press, 2000), 21-22.↑
6.Albert R. Hunt, "A Villain in Selma, but Not in Real Life," New York Times, January 18, 2015.↑
7.For only one recent illustration of current efforts to suppress minority voting see "Long Lines at Minority Polling Places," New York Times, September 25, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/opinion/long-lines-at-minority-polling-places.html?mabReward=RI%3A7&action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&region=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article.↑
8.See, e.g., Eric Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Foner's compendium covers only those officials elected prior to Hayes-Tilden.↑
9.Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement: The Changing Political Economy of Southern Racism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987); C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Thomas Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), and David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).↑
10.J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974).↑
11.Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Puzzle of Black Republicans," New York Times, December 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/opinion/the-puzzle-of-black-republicans.html?_r=0.↑
12.Henry Lee Moon Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1948), 179 and Arnold R. Hirsch, "Simply a Matter of Black and White: The Transformation of Race and Politics in Twentieth-Century New Orleans" in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logdson, eds., 273.↑
13.While it is a reasonable exercise of artistic license that the film doesn't depict Selma's local politics at all, that it doesn't do so avoids the potentially complicating fact that the white mayor, Joe Smitherman, who was elected the year before the Selma march, remained in that office until 2000.)↑
14.Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 79.↑
15.See Albert Karnig and Susan Welch, Black Representation and Urban Policy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 50-78.↑
16.Reed, Stirrings, 163-77.↑
17.Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1989); Claude Barnes, "Political Power and Economic Dependence: An Analysis of Atlanta's Black Urban Regime," Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Clark-Atlanta University, 1991; Dennis R. Judd, "Electoral Coalitions, Minority Mayors, and the Contradictions in the Municipal Policy Agenda" in Cities in Stress: A New Look at the Urban Crisis, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews #30 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1986); Bryan D. Jones and Lynn Bachelor, The Sustaining Hand: Community Leadership and Corporate Power (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1986); Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom?: Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); William E. Nelson, Jr., "Cleveland: The Evolution of Black Political Power" in The New Black Politics: The Search for Political Power (New York: Longmans, 1987), Michael Preston, Lenneal Henderson and Paul Puryear, eds., and Robert Smith, We Have No Leaders: African American in the Post Civil Rights Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).↑
18.John David Arena, Driven From New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Push Privatization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Timothy P. R. Weaver, The Neoliberal Persuasion: Urban Policy and Politics in the United States and the United Kingdom, forthcoming University of Pennsylvania Press; Kent Germany, New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), and Megan French-Marcelin, "Community Underdevelopment: Federal Aid and the Rise of Privatization in New Orleans, 1970–1985," Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2014. ↑
19.Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) and Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). This edition of the 1968 book includes foreword by Cedric Johnson. See also Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and "Black Power Nationalism as Ethnic Pluralism: Postwar Liberalism's Ethnic Paradigm in Black Radicalism" in Reed, Warren et al., Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), 184-214. ↑
20.Alex Willingham, "Ideology and Politics: Their Status in Afro-American Social Theory," Endarch 1 (Spring 1975): 4-23; reprinted in Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). ↑
21.Preston H. Smith, II, Racial Democracy in the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Michelle Boyd, Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstructing Race in Bronzeville (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↑
Adolph Reed, Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics.
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Work to expand Rye cemetery could start shortly if the local authority gives the green light to funding for the scheme.
Rother District Council, which is responsible for the facility, says the cemetery will be full within the next two or three years unless the site is expanded.
The council had initially hoped to expand the cemetery to the west, but problems with acquiring the land scuppered Rother's plans. Now, following a ground radar survey, RDC wants to expand the cemetery to the north.
It says this will provide sufficient capacity for burials for a further 30 years, based on the current rate.
The cost of the work is expected to come from council reserves, with a maximum spend of £20,000.
Of this final amount, £15,900 will be used to create a pedestrian pathway and turning circle, while clearance, soft landscaping and seeding is expected to cost £770.
An access gate for vehicles will set the council back by £480.
The budget will include a contingency fund totalling £2,572.
In a report to be presented to Rother's cabinet meeting on Monday (November 2), Dr Anthony Leonard, executive director of services at RDC, said: "If development of this area of the cemetery does not take place alternative space will be required to meet the demand. Land adjacent to the cemetery is in private ownership and it is expected that this would require a compulsory purchase order to complete the land transfer.
If councillors give the go ahead for the project and the funding, work will begin on the site 'at the earliest opportunity'.


The 3rd edition of Mobile Week Barcelona opens a space for dialogue for citizens with the aim of reflecting on the impact of technology in our society. This year's edition reflects on the digital transformation of society from the most intimate spheres of the human being, as if it were a personal relationship. Starting from the daily negotiations that we engage with technology in almost all areas of our daily life, the possible repercussions of these agreements and disagreements are raised to constitute the basis of a common pact for the future. A unique and integrating initiative to lead technological change from the city as a whole, addressing the great challenges and opportunities posed by technologies in terms of culture, quality of life, privacy, ethics, sustainability or safety.
The programme will take place in 5 Spanish cities: Barcelona, Girona, Igualada, Lleida, Reus, Ribera d'Ebre and comprises of conferences, round tables, workshops, expositions, Between the 14th and 23rd of February.


Bicycle Line was established in 1987 based on the entrepreneurial vision of Gastone Coghetto, whose extensive experience in the cycling sector soon lead to the production of high-tech items that continually evolved along with the requests and needs of customers. When his three sons joined the company, their father's experience was blended with dynamism and increasingly strong development.
At BL we believe creativity doesn't have to be limited to art or literature. Our philosophy is to bring the highest levels of innovation and creativity to our cycling apparel. This is why we offer you the opportunity to express yourself in the clothing you wear every day out on your bike.
From our website you can custom design your own kit in a just few simple clicks and create a completely unique look, made to measure just for you. Our R&D department is always on hand to offer assistance and help you in every phase of the process so as to ensure the highest quality end result.


The resolution — co-authored by Senators Kimiko Hirota '20, Erica Scott '20, Katie Hufker '18, Hamzeh Daoud '20, Deputy Chair Remy Gordon '20 and 18th Undergraduate Chair Shanta Katipamula '19 — identifies various issues with the Campus Climate Survey, which was first administered in 2015. According to the new resolution, the survey failed to collect data on several issues, including the location of sexual assaults on campus, incapacitation by alcohol or drug use and non-physical forms of partner abuse such as emotional and economic abuse.
Because the first Town Hall to address issues with the 2015 survey was not held until last week, Stanford Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP) leaders Jacqueline Lin '18 and Stephanie Pham '18 urged the Senate to pass the resolution and the administration to hold off on administering a survey until the students' desired improvements are made.
In addition, the resolution proposes that the Campus Climate Survey Committee be made permanent and expanded to include greater student representation. Specifically, the resolution recommended that students from the sociology and psychology departments be included, as their expertise would be of use in crafting an effective survey.
The Senate also introduced a joint resolution in support of continuing an Introduction to Disability Studies course. The resolution, authored by Hufker, calls on the Undergraduate Senate and the Graduate Student Council to actively ally with Stanford's disability community. According to Executive Cabinet disability lead Bryce Tuttle '20, the class was successfully introduced during fall quarter. Thirty students completed the course, breaking the original enrollment cap of 24. Despite the class' debut success, however, Tuttle stated that there is not yet a provision to require teaching it again in the future.
Tuttle said he believes that Stanford needs to ensure commitment to not only the field of disabilities studies, but also the disability community itself, which comprises between 12 and 17 percent of Stanford's student body, according to the Office of Accessible Education.
Senate Chair Kojoh Atta '20 echoed this sentiment.
"I always think it's good when Stanford and other elite institutions are really highlighting the struggles and identities of marginalized communities," Atta said.
The Undergraduate Senate will be voting on both the Campus Climate Survey and disability course resolutions during its 21st meeting next week.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a total of fifteen graduate students signed two letters to the administration in support of the AAU survey. In fact, a total of 215, not fifteen, graduate students signed the letters. The Daily regrets this error.


text:
Q: Flex Mobile How to pass info from Page One (List.selectedItem) to the third page? I have 3 pages view,

*

*HomeView

*ViewPg02

*ViewPg03

In HomeView, has a List control and when user select an item it will goes to ViewPg02
protected function myList_changeHandler(event:IndexChangeEvent):void    {
                navigator.pushView(views.ViewPg02, myList.selectedItem, null);  }

In ViewPg02, has an image control and it get the image display info from myList.selectedItem
<s:Image id="imageScreen1" width="100%" height="100%"
                 source="images/{data.image}"

and when user click on the picture, it will go to ViewPg03  with the following code:
protected function imageScreen_clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void  {
                navigator.pushView(ViewPg03);
                    }

Problem: I get a blank page in ViewPg03 and I can't use myList.selectedItem in ViewPg02.
How do it get the same image in ViewPg02 to display in ViewPg03 ?
Thanks.

A: Can't you just continue to pass the data along to page 3?
navigator.pushView(ViewPg03, data);

Doing this will pass the data property again to page three and you can display the image the same way.  Or am I missing something?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Celebrity health expert and four-time New York Times bestselling author, JJ Virgin reveals how one life-altering event taught her to tap into an indomitable mindset, trust her instincts, and defy the odds, ultimately saving her son's life…and her own. She'll share the lessons she learned that can help you create your own resilient mindset. In 2012, JJ Virgin was in a hospital room next to her sixteen-year-old son who was struck by a hit-and-run driver and left for dead. She was told by doctors that he wouldn't last through the night and to let him go. With every reason to give up, JJ chose instead to invest her energy into the hope that her son would not just survive, but thrive. In Miracle Mindset, she shares the lessons that gave her the courage to overcome the worst moment of her life. During this difficult time, she learned valuable personal lessons that helped her rebuild her life and find success and purpose in herself, her work, and teach her sons and community how to face their own obstacles and trials. Lessons like "Don't Wish It Were Easier, Make Yourself Stronger" and "Your Limitations will Become Your Life" will lead you to your own personal power and purpose, even when the deck seems stacked against you. With true stories from her life, her clients, and other well-known thought leaders, she can help you transform your mindset and your daily habits to endure the difficult battles that life sends your way. Insightful, personal, and completely relatable, Miracle Mindset proves that miracles are possible when you show up, remain positive, and do the work.


Following Asuka winning the first ever Women's Royal Rumble, Ronda Rousey debuted in the WWE.
Nothing happened other than her appearing with Charlotte Flair, Asuka, and Alexis Bliss being in the ring.
For what it is worth, the former UFC champion denied rumors that she'd be participating in Sunday's women's Royal Rumble match as she'll be filming a movie out of the country.
"I'm actually leaving to Colombia right now to finish shooting Mile 22 and I won't be back until mid-February," Rousey told TMZ.
The former Women's bantamweight champion added that she still hasn't signed a contract with WWE. Obviously, that now appears to be a work.
Earlier this week, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter (per subscription) also reported that Rousey would "likely" win the first ever female Royal Rumble match if she participated. She didn't win, but certainly made a huge impact.
On Jan. 9, the former MMA champion was captured alongside Paul "Triple H" Levesque — WWE's Executive Vice President of Talent, Live Events and Creative — for what was presumed to be a business meeting.
The show ended with Rousey shaking Stephanie McMahon's hand and walking off.