Imagine

What happens in neighborhoods where the self esteem
has been over shadowed by the decay
and the children no longer play the way they used to.

Where young boys choose to follow figures that had no father figures.
A place where lives have been reduce to mere names on a nigger wall
a lot of dead shames on a nigger wall
‘cause most of my childhood friends died over some dumb shit.

It’s like we all on some slum shit
What happened to that “We Shall Overcome” shit?
Nigger, where I’m from, shit, they done torn down the projects
And took away neighborhood sports.

It’s a place where little black boys put on jerseys and shorts.
Dream big about stardom on fine hard wood courts
but await to the harsh reality of the strip unfinished inner city floor
where life splinters.

Cold winters are sheltered by crack houses
instead of recreation centers that they claim to not have the paper
to keep open for operation.

The deconstruction of the black family has been in
perpetuation ever since Willie Lynch has set his theory in motion.
Decharacterization was his sole promotion.

Therefore, if you take the basketball out of his face and
put the coke in its place he’ll still score.
What’s a young boy when he doesn’t want to do wrong but there’s
a lock on the right door.

When he has the heart of a soldier, the aggression of a prize fighter
but no one has taught him what to fight for, see
most our families are fatherless and quite poor.

So we miss out on meals as well as kisses and hugs
You’ve got the audacity to cut the funding for the
facilities to keep us off the streets
then ask us Why we sell drugs?

But imagine if niggers put down their dice and guns
and picked up their daughters and sons and
put a little love right there where the hate is.

Imagine if niggers had chance to become accountants
before being taught what the difference between wet and dry is.
Imagine if these little inner city kids had the same type of schools
as these little rich kids had way out there in the sticks.

Imagine if niggers had the chance to
learn chemistry for real before we learn how to whip 7½ out of six.
Imagine if these little black girls could go to these dance schools for free
and learn to love the dream of that Broadway show.

Imagine if she wasn’t forced into a game where you assume a
filthy name to put your soul and ass up for show.
Imagine she was taught to love herself, imitate no one,
demand and demonstrate respect when she walks though the door.
Imagine if she watched the tellie and saw herself during the prime time hour instead
of the four o’clock video whore.

Imagine.

-------------------------
Black Ice spoken word “Imagine” is his take on how the lack of opportunities in the inner city deprives young men and women of a positive self image and self respect.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Darling I'm kill
I'm in puddle on the floor
Waiting for you to return
Oh what a trill
Vacillations good lord
How you tease
How you leave me to burn
It's so deadly my dear
The power of having you near

Until the day ends
Until the world falls away
Until you say there will be no more good-byes
I see it in your eyes
Tomorrow never dies

Darling you've won
It's no fun
Martinis, girls, and guns
It's murder on our love affair
You bet your life
Every night
While you chase every morning die
You're not the only spy out there
It's so deadly my dear
The power of wanting you near

Until the day ends
Until the world falls away
Until you say there will be no more good-byes
I see it in your eyes
Tomorrow never dies

lyrics by Mitchell Froom and Sheryl Crow

270 Seconds To A Better Marriage

Here is a three-step approach to a more satisfying marriage:

MORNING

First thing, take 90 seconds to give her the greatest good morning possible: “Good morning. I love you.” And if she’s asleep, you can lower your voice and whisper, “I love you. Have an awesome day.” She’ll hear you anyway.

AFTER WORK

Right when you get home, focus on her for a full 90 seconds. If she’s happy, you go happy; if she’s low, you go low, and make sure you look her in the eyes long enough to discern her eye color. This says, I value you, I need you.

NIGHT

Sometime during the last thirty minutes before bed, take 90 seconds to engage fully with her. Do not talk about children, money, or work. Don’t talk about the past at all. Look at her, stroke her hair, snuggle up to her, tell her you love her.

CONCLUSION

90 seconds in the morning, 90 seconds after work (or any time you’ve been away from her for at least two hours), and 90 seconds at night. That’s how you bond. After seven to ten days, the marriage will change for the positive. Guaranteed.

- by Jim Fannin, reprinted from Esquire, May 2011, p152

The Making and Remaking of Malcolm X

by David Remnick

On summer nights, in 1963, Malcolm X drove his blue Oldsmobile from Mosque No. 7, the Harlem headquarters of the Nation of Islam, to an apartment building on Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, where a freelance writer named Alex Haley sat waiting for him in an eight-by-ten-foot studio. There, the two would remain until early morning. Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm — tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive. “My whole life has been a chronology of changes,” Malcolm told Haley one night, and, in a few months, he would transform himself yet again, becoming El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim.

When Haley first met Malcolm, in 1959, he had recently retired from a twenty-year career in the Coast Guard, and had embarked on a career as a journalist. He soon published articles about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm in Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Haley was not at all in accord with the Nation’s theology or its vehement ideology of racial separatism. He was a liberal Republican, an integrationist, who admired A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — the mainstream civil-rights leaders whom Malcolm denounced as “stooges” and “lackeys.”

“You’re another of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” Malcolm told Haley at their first meeting. Despite their obvious differences, though, Malcolm thought that Haley’s articles had been fair. After interviewing Malcolm for Playboy, Haley persuaded him to collaborate on an “as told to” autobiography. They would split a twenty-thousand-dollar advance from Doubleday.

The first sessions on Grove Street were frustrating, as Malcolm spent countless hours praising the wisdom of Elijah Muhammad, and avoided all mention of his own life. Then came a night when Haley asked Malcolm, “I wonder if you’d tell me something about your mother?” Malcolm’s voice softened. Walking in a tight circle, he said, “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat.” He began to tell the story of his life, how the family’s house was burned to the ground by the white racists of the Black Legion, how his white teacher told him he could never be a lawyer (“That’s no realistic goal for a nigger!”). They talked until dawn, accumulating much of a first chapter, which Haley titled “Nightmare.”

Haley’s ambition was to write a bestseller; in Malcolm, he recognized not a great man, necessarily, but a great story, even a dangerous one. By 1964, Malcolm had fallen out with the Nation of Islam, and he became convinced, rightly, that he did not have long to live. Followed all his public life by the F.B.I. and the police, Malcolm was now being pursued by the Nation, with its thuggish “pipe squads,” the Fruit of Islam. Haley cared for Malcolm, but he cared for the book no less. “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book,” he wrote Malcolm in a long letter. “There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?” In order to fend off deadlines, meanwhile, Haley wrote buoyantly to his agent and editors, insisting that the book would “sweep the market like wildfire”: “For this man is so hot, so HOT, a subject . . . this book is so pregnant with millions or more sales potential, including to make foreign rights hotly bid for!”

On February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights, multiple assassins fired shotguns and pistols at Malcolm as he stepped to the lectern for a speech. Two hours after hearing the news, Haley wrote to his agent, “None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters . . . I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.”

The publisher, Nelson Doubleday, fearing for the lives of his staff, cancelled his deal with Haley; Barney Rosset, the bold and ingenious proprietor of Grove Press, picked up the contract. He would not be sorry. Between 1965 and 1977, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” sold six million copies worldwide, and the book continues to sell briskly, both to general readers and to students for whom it is required reading. In 1992, Spike Lee set off a bout of “Malcolmania,” with his three-hour-plus film. In its wake, people as unlikely as Dan Quayle talked sympathetically about Malcolm. A poll showed that eighty-four per cent of African-Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four saw Malcolm as “a hero for black Americans today.” The video for Public Enemy’s “Shut ’Em Down” put Malcolm’s face on the dollar bill. A vivid but secondary figure in his own time, Malcolm X had achieved the status of an icon. And he did it with a book that he never lived to see published.

For nearly twenty years, Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia, labored on what he hoped would be a definitive scholarly work on Malcolm X. During this period, Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a pulmonary disease, and even underwent a double lung transplant. Recently, he completed his rigorous and evenhanded biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Viking; $30), but, in an echo of his subject’s fate, he died on the eve of publication. One of his goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits — “the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

The literary urge outran the knowable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood. One evening, in 1931, in Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was six, his father, Earl Little, a part-time Garveyite teacher, went to collect “chicken money” from families who bought poultry from him. That night, he was found bleeding to death on the streetcar tracks. The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

It’s indisputable that the family suffered terribly, from both racism and humiliating poverty. This was an era of lynchings, Jim Crow, and economic depression. Malcolm says he was sometimes “dizzy” with hunger. His mother became a barely functional depressive, given to mumbling to herself for hours in a rocking chair; she was eventually institutionalized. Malcolm, who was sent off to a series of foster homes and an all-white school, scarcely saw her for twenty-five years. Even if Malcolm’s autobiography intensified the colors of his story, the general grimness of “Nightmare”—his sense of deprivation and hurt, his rage at white society—is borne out by Marable’s scholarship.

Malcolm worked for a while on Pullman trains, clowning for the passengers, and eventually landed in Roxbury and Harlem, where he was a small-time gangster, with a conk and a zoot suit, pimping and selling dope, hanging out with musicians, hustlers, and prostitutes at famous nightspots like the Roseland Ballroom and Small’s Paradise. Like Charlie Parker before him, he washed dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. He not only ran numbers but wagered on them, too: “Every day I would gamble all of my tips — as high as fifteen and twenty dollars—on the numbers, and dream of what I would do when I hit.”

Although the autobiography portrays him as apolitical during these years, this seems to have been a dramatic device to signal ignorance before enlightenment. Marable tracked down a reliable witness who says that Malcolm “would talk often about how his father used to get brutalized and beat up on the corner selling Marcus Garvey’s paper, and he would talk a lot about Garvey’s concepts in terms of how they could benefit us as a people.”

In Boston, Malcolm worked for William Paul Lennon, the son of a successful Rhode Island merchant. In 1944, Malcolm was a “butler and occasional house worker” at Lennon’s house on Arlington Street, near the Public Garden. In the autobiography, he writes about his friend Rudy, who went to see the “blueblood” every week: “He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.” Marable writes that, “based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon.” When this suggestion first surfaced, in a tendentious 1991 biography by Bruce Perry, the criticism was huge, but Marable insists that the evidence is now more compelling.

The days of Detroit Red came to an end in 1946. Malcolm and another hustler named Shorty Jarvis, along with their two white girlfriends, went on a robbery spree, and Malcolm was arrested trying to get a stolen watch repaired. After the judge gave him and Jarvis concurrent eight-to-ten-year sentences, Malcolm’s lawyer told him, “You had no business with white girls!”

At Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm boasted about his criminal exploits, got high on nutmeg, and met a jailhouse autodidact who convinced him of the virtues of books. Malcolm started reading Kant and Nietzsche, H. G. Wells and Herodotus; he even tried to memorize the dictionary. In 1948, he received a letter from his older brother Philbert saying that he and others in the family had converted to the Nation of Islam — “a program designed to help black people.” After reading up on the Nation, Malcolm sat in his cell and wrote twenty-five drafts of a one-page letter to Elijah Muhammad, pledging his spiritual loyalty. In a welcoming reply, Elijah Muhammad enclosed a five-dollar bill.

If you are a believer (and very few are these days), the origins of the Nation of Islam stretch back thousands of years, to a time when blacks, the “original people,” were assaulted by a mutant white race created by an evil “Big Head” scientist named Yacub. The whites achieved dominion over the earth and blacks “went to sleep,” mentally and spiritually. The purpose of the Nation of Islam was to rouse the black man from his slumber. (Armed spaceships come into it, too.) Such were the teachings of Wallace D. Fard, an ex-con, silk salesman, and eccentric storefront preacher who turned up in a Detroit ghetto around 1930. Fard also had more earthly advice. He told his followers to avoid alcohol, to work hard and save money, to own their own businesses, and to regain a sense of the nobility of their race. His Nation of Islam represented a cultish offshoot of a venerable American movement, black nationalism.

One summer night, in 1931, at a former Garveyite meeting hall in Detroit, a onetime sharecropper from Georgia with a fourth-grade education named Elijah Poole came to hear Fard preach, and afterward told him, “I know who you are, you are God himself.” “That’s right,” Fard said. “But don’t tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known.” Fard set up operations in Chicago, and Poole became his minister. In 1934, Fard mysteriously disappeared and the apostle, now called Elijah Muhammad, took command of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation that Malcolm joined when he was released, in 1952, was tiny and largely apolitical. Its members, who numbered in the hundreds, were instructed not to vote. Elijah Muhammad, who was remarkably uncharismatic, quickly recognized in Malcolm a dynamic and tireless organizer and speaker, and dispatched him to Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and, finally, Harlem, to establish new temples. While the civil-rights movement developed in the South, Malcolm went from ghetto to ghetto in the North, the Midwest, and California. He turned white supremacy on its head—whites were “blue-eyed devils”—and urged solidarity with the emerging independence movements of Africa and Asia. His early appeal was based less on the coherence of his political ideas than on the raw excitement of his presence at the lectern, the fierce clarity of his rhetoric, and (for all his verbal ferocity) a certain cool charm, even toward white reporters. For many poor, young, urban blacks, King was too middle-class and genteel, too Southern, too churchly and high-flown; Malcolm had lived as they had. “Nobody could handle Malcolm,” Louis Farrakhan, his protégé and eventual enemy, said. “I never saw Malcolm smoke. I never saw Malcolm curse. I never saw Malcolm wink at a woman. I never saw Malcolm eat in between meals. He ate one meal a day. He got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to say his prayers. I never saw Malcolm late for an appointment. Malcolm was like a clock.” By 1961, according to Marable, the Nation had as many as seventy-five thousand members.

Even outsiders were impressed. Malcolm “is an excellent speaker, forceful and convincing,” one F.B.I. informant said, in 1958. “He is an expert organizer and an untiring worker,” whose hatred for whites “is not likely to erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that.”

Malcolm was not above appealing to the worst instincts of his followers. “Jews run the country,” he said. Women were “tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh.” As a way to mock the passive resisters of the mainstream civil-rights movement, he distinguished between the honest masses, the “field Negroes,” and the perfidious “house Negroes,” who were forever looking to their white masters for privilege and approval. (The political scientist Adolph Reed points out that the famous slave-revolt leaders — Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gabriel Prosser—were house slaves.) Malcolm’s desire to rouse his followers and scandalize the white majority could lead him to disastrous miscalculations: in January, 1961, he met with representatives of the Klan, in Atlanta, confiding to his hooded interlocutors, “The Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.”

But the former numbers runner had an appetite for the high-stakes gamble. While King sought to enlist the sympathies of the white majority in order to achieve racial integration, Malcolm, the incendiary separatist, freely indulged his penchant for outrage. In June, 1962, a plane crashed in Paris carrying mostly well-to-do white passengers from Atlanta. In front of more than a thousand people in Los Angeles, Malcolm said that the disaster was “a very beautiful thing”: “We call on our God—he gets rid of a hundred and twenty of them.”

By 1959, fissures had emerged between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. Some of Elijah’s lieutenants resented Malcolm’s fame, his appearances with Mike Wallace and other television interviewers; others worried that Malcolm was angling to take over the Nation when Elijah died. But the tensions took on seamier aspects. In 1958, Malcolm married a woman named Betty Sanders, but by the following year the marriage (which is portrayed sentimentally in Lee’s film) was foundering. Malcolm sent a distressed letter to Elijah Muhammad:

The main source of our trouble was based on SEX … She placed a great deal more stress upon it than I was physically capable of doing. … At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction. From then on, try as I may, I began to become very cool toward her … She later said she was going to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

Somehow, Elijah’s lieutenants learned about Malcolm’s problems, and did not hesitate to spread humiliating rumors.

Later that year, Malcolm heard that a young secretary at the Nation’s headquarters with whom he had had a romance before he married Betty was pregnant, and, he subsequently learned, with Elijah Muhammad’s child. Indeed, Elijah had impregnated other young women. When the woman asked Elijah for money, he was cruel and dismissive, saying, “You must think I’m a fool or Santa Claus.” When she called again, he told a minister who heard the exchange, “It looks like she will have to be put down.” By the early sixties, Malcolm had confronted Elijah about his sexual behavior, further offending the leadership of the Nation.

Finally, the relationship between Malcolm and his mentor exploded. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm defied the Nation’s instructions to stay quiet and said that the murder in Dallas represented “the chickens coming home to roost.” He added, “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad. They’ve always made me glad.” Elijah Muhammad “silenced” Malcolm X. Officially, the punishment was supposed to last just three months, but there seemed no chance of resolution. Malcolm was on his own. “I hadn’t hustled in the streets for years for nothing,” Malcolm told Haley. “I knew when I was being set up.”

In 1964, Malcolm decided to reform his soul, alter his politics, and refashion his public image. After touring Africa and the Middle East for two months, during which he made the hajj, he returned to Harlem an orthodox Muslim, a man in flux. His Garveyite belief in entrepreneurial capitalism shifted to socialism. He disavowed separatism. In a letter to a Times reporter, M. S. Handler, he wrote, “Some of my very dearest friends are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists — some are capitalists, socialists, conservatives, extremists . . . some are even Uncle Toms—some are black, brown, red, yellow and some are even white.”

Malcolm’s shift in the last year of his life, as dramatized in his autobiography, is what allowed middle-class blacks and white liberals to admire him. When Bill Clinton wore an “X” cap, he was not railing against blue-eyed devils; he was gesturing to this late, “humanistic” Malcolm. (He was also making a fashion statement.) Yet even in the final passage of his life Malcolm failed to build a serious political movement or create a coherent point of view. He had only a brief time left to him; everything was not resolved or reconciled. He was still full of contradictions, praising King one day, ridiculing him the next, hailing Elijah Muhammad before one audience, then denouncing him before another. He still could not accept nonviolent revolution. Three days before his death, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.”

Malcolm clearly made his deepest impression on the American consciousness through his collaboration with Alex Haley. By joining Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright in the act of literary testimony, Malcolm became part of the most essential genre of African-American literature. With its depiction of racism and struggle, with its search for purpose, identity, community, and a name, Malcolm’s autobiography followed a familiar pattern—what the scholar Robert B. Stepto calls the “narrative of ascent.” “Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote. “They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life.”

But what do Malcolm’s readers see in him? Writing two decades ago, Cornel West called Malcolm “the skeleton in the closet lodged in the racial memory of most black professionals.” Consider the foremost black professional in the country—the President of the United States. After Barack Obama was inaugurated, he returned to the British government a bust of Winston Churchill that was on display in the Oval Office and installed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is rightly regarded as the singular hero of the era that lasted from the Montgomery bus boycott, in 1955, to his death, in April, 1968. Malcolm was an electrifying spokesman for black dignity and selfhood, a radical prod to the mainstream movement, but his role in the civil-rights movement was marginal.

Yet, when Obama was young and trying to come to terms with his own identity, he read the autobiography and it affected him more deeply than even the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. In balmy Hawaii, at the most prestigious private school west of the Rockies, Obama found something in the narrative of a man who was also of mixed race, had lost his father, and needed to create a self. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me,” Obama wrote of Malcolm in “Dreams from My Father.” “The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.” Obama, who adored his white mother and grandparents, was disturbed by Malcolm’s desire to “expunge” the white blood in him. What he admired was the book’s depiction of Malcolm’s redemptive journey and his redemptive, universalist final year.

“I was never taken with some of his theorizing,” Obama told me last year. “I think that what Malcolm X did, though, was to tap into a long-running tradition within the African-American community, which is that, at certain moments, it’s important for African-Americans to assert their manhood, their worth. . . . That affirmation that I am a man, I am worth something, I think was important. And I think Malcolm X probably captured that better than anybody.”

Obama dealt with black nationalists on Chicago’s South Side both as an organizer and as a state senator. Louis Farrakhan’s headquarters were within his district. When he first got to Chicago, he heard the nationalists on the radio and read their publication The Final Call. He came to see that their message had “twin strands,” one that was an affirmation of pride and self-reliance and one that depended on hatred, a form of “magical thinking” that deluded those who “could least afford such make-believe.” Of course, the complexities of that world reflect Malcolm X’s own complexities, his contradictions and resentments and hopes.

The narrative that Alex Haley crafted is, in certain respects, profoundly comforting: it transforms those twin strands into a distinct before and after. Here was a Malcolm who could still embody the legitimate rage of a humiliated people but also become part of the very cultural firmament he anathematized—a Malcolm who could, and did, end up on a postage stamp. Although Manning Marable may not have succeeded in writing a definitive work, his considerable scholarship does remind us how much is elided by any tale of a pilgrim’s progress. If the autobiography simplified reality, however, it kept faith with its subject’s ambitions. By choosing to entrust his story to Alex Haley, Malcolm assured himself a lasting place in American culture. It was his most brilliant wager.

reprinted from New Yorker magazine, 25 April 2011, page 74

Ralph’s Super Nazimarket

My formal complaint prompted the manager of the local Ralph’s to call me. He said that he had spoken to legal and they would prefer that I don't shop there and if I do I will be thrown out. I am absolutely AMAZED that he would start the conversation with, “I’m right and you’re wrong and NO SOUP FOR YOU.” I asked if I would be receiving something from their legal department and he said yes. I am amazed that he would tell me not to shop at Ralph’s. I said, “I don't see how you can refuse to let me shop there.” And he said, “They could and I would be THROWN OUT. He also said that they will not recycle and that I should recycle at Food4Less.” Then he wished me a nice day and hung up the phone.

UNBELIEVABLE. I will NEVER shop at Ralph's again or Food4Less which are both owned by Kroger.

What happened to my legal rights and my civil rights??? So that’s what I get from writing the corporate office. I am okay with that – I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that wouldn’t have me as a member. To my friends and fellow travelers – Ralph’s Supermarket treats some (and you know one) customers without any respect or dignity. Ralph’s Supermarket does not freely accept recycle bottle and cans. Ralph’s Supermarket would rather that you shop at their competitor because they don’t believe that the customer is at the core of their business. Ralph’s Supermarket is a bully. Ralph’s Supermarket is a Nazimarket.

DO NOT SHOP at Ralph’s Supermarket.

Someone owes me $1.63

I really appreciate the advice a FB friend gave me which was to return my empty bottles and cans to the Recycle Center located in National City. I took my empties to the 30th Street location and found it clean and well organized. The signage was easy to understand and instructed me to separate plastic, cans and bottles into separate bins. When I selected a bin to start with a homeless man (or so I suspected) politely in barely a whisper said to be careful with that bin as it had hidden sharp edges which could easily cut my hand. It took me a full second to appreciate and reflect on what was a truly humane moment, that this “experienced” urban scavenger would look out for a newbie like me. I was humbled by his humanity and concern.

I counted out 109 bottles and cans. Calculated at $.05 per item would equal $5.45 refund at the supermarket. But recycling centers calculate the refund based on weight. The refund rate on plastic was $.93/pound. The weight of my plastic was 1.8 pounds which totaled a $1.67 refund. The refund rate on aluminum was $1.54/pound. The weight of my cans was 1.2 pounds which totaled a $1.85 refund. I had six glass bottles which were counted out and totaled $.30 refund. My total refund $3.82

So I did the responsible thing: collected and cleaned all of my empty bottles and cans. Hauled them to a recycling center, and efficiently separated them into bins to be weighed, which resulted in a LOSS of $1.63 against what I had paid $.05 on each bottle and can. I’m not sure that going Green makes sense to me. I tried to return my empties to the supermarket where I purchased the items, only to be humiliated and treated as a problem rather than part of the environmental solution. I tired to return my empties to a recycling center and found myself shorted on my original expense. Either method seems to undermine the spirit and intent of recycling.

There has to be a better solution.

Ralph's Supermarket is VERY mean @ San Diego

So, I brought the Ralph's memo supporting bottle redemption with me when I went to Ralph's to return three bags of soda cans and bottles. The cashier refused, then the manager came over and said they don't do that and I would have to go to Food4Less. I showed him the memo from the other manager saying they have to do it, dated March 27th. He was condescending and big and scary and all my anxiety came out. I told him I've been through this before and to please not make me go through it again. I said the last time I had to use my cellphone to videotape them to get them to do it. He refused, stating that I could go to food town and that because there was a recycling center within a mile of the store he did not have to do it.

I told him to call the police, because I wasn't moving and I had already unpacked 60 cans. He said he would do it this once, but never again. The cashier told me she didn't know how to do it and all the cashiers looked at me like I was a homeless person or the devil.

After I stood there about 10 minutes I called out to one of the cashiers who had scanned my empties the last time and asked if they were all just going to ignore me. All the cashiers said the manager said they didn't have to do it. I can't blame them since managers are known to fire workers on the spot in San Diego. She called the manager again and he came back and said they would do it this one time and that next time he would have signage stating they didn't have to recycle and that he would give me literature stating they didn't have to recycle. I told him it was the recycling law that any place that sells cans had to take them. But I was really upset by then, it was all I could do not to cry. He again told me that since Food4Less is a recycling center Ralph's doesn't have to take empty cans or bottles. I told him I didn't shop at Food4Less, but I did shop at Ralphs.

Very upsetting.

I don't think I can emotionally go through it again. I received $10.55 (it should have been $10.60 but I wasn't going to fight them over a nickel given the state I was in). Then I went to the shoe repair shop and picked up my shoe that the dog had ripped last week (the sandles that I live in) and paid the man $9.50 for the repair.

What a day.

Parental website control

For parents who want an effective way to restrict your child's access to inappropriate material on the web check out opendns.org. Basically what you do is set your computer's default DNS to point to the IP address of opendns.org; it DNS (domain name system) associates IP addresses with host names (for example, the IP address of www.bet.com is 209.10.145.13). It is easier to remember a name rather than a string of numbers, so DNS does this association for you. OpenDNS sets up categories and you can restrict access based on these categories or specifc websites. In this way you can restrict access to social networking sites, adult contents, drugs, alcohol, etc.

Bon Appétit in San Diego

Bali Hai Restaurant
2230 Shelter Island Drive
San Diego (619) 222-1181
www.balihairestaurant.com

Surfing on the popularity of the Broadway musical South Pacific, Bali Hai debuted in October 1954 as the town's first "tiki temple," offering up Polynesian floor shows, "island" cuisine, and a cocktail list replete with planter's punch and near-lethal mai tais. This Shelter Island landmark emerged from several months of intensive remodeling with the same tiki vibe and World Famous Bali Hai Mai Tai. But its owners also made some important updates, including more serious Hawai'i-accented menus, created by respected chef Christopher Powell, and an even more panoramic view that now extends to the seagoing Coronado Islands floating off Baja California. There are no murals of island life, since murals require walls, and Bali Hai instead offers windows covering about 300 degrees of its circumference. By day, views encompass San Diego Bay and distant Mount San Miguel beyond downtown; by night, the backlit honey onyx bar lends drama to the richly polished tree trunks that support heavy roof beams. For starters, consider the lili'i tasting for two, a platter of ahi tartare, coconut shrimp, crispy spring rolls, and teriyaki-flavored edamame. The kama'ilina crab salad, decorated with papaya and hearts of palm and spiced with a kimchee "consomme," is also clever and satisfying. One of several culinary holdovers from the old Bali Hai menu is the crisp, savory Chicken of the Gods. It's good, but better choices include the elegantly garnished Maple Leaf duck breast or sizable New York steak with soy-flavored pesto and garlic-glazed choi sum. Among seafood options, standouts include a wok-fried whole striped bass served with Szechuan-style vegetables and an excellent Alaskan halibut with tempura squash blossoms. For a dessert as lovely as a Polynesian princess, look no further than the vanilla poached pineapple with a rum-soaked baba.
- Review by David Nelson, March 2011

Setting: A remodeled resort like location on Shelter Island, with rare woods inside and panoramic views of San Diego Bay
Service: Very friendly and informal
Best dishes: Kama'aina crab salad; Alaskan halibut; New York steak with soy pesto
Dinner prices: Starters, $7-$17 entrees, $1b-$24 desserts, $7

Bon Appétit in San Diego

Sapori
120 Orange Avenue
Coronado (619) 319-5696
http://www.saporicoronado.com/

Laura and Raffaele Petrazzuolo took a 28-year journey around the world en route to Coronado. They met at Hotel Le Grand on the isle of Jersey in the English Channel. Laura, an Englishwoman of Irish heritage, was a trained chef, pastry chef, and chocolatier. (Would she consider her amazing walnut-date caramel tart a confection or a pastry?) Raffaele, from Italy, waited tables. They married and immigrated to Sydney, Australia, where they operated several Italian restaurants until they fell in love with Coronado while vacationing. With their school-age daughters in tow, they recently returned and opened Sapori in 2010. Fans of authentic Italian fare will appreciate the move. Laura oversees the kitchen and personally prepares the handsome desserts. Raffaele, ever so deft when serving, guides the meal at a gentle pace. In the dining room and on the shady terrace from which a few tables enjoy views across San Diego, the day's menu is chalked in capital letters on enormous blackboards. When zucchini blossoms are in season, savor them stuffed with silky ricotta mousse, floured, flash-fried, and served sizzling with pesto and arugula. Sizable portions encourage sharing, especially with the marvelous antipasto of hors d'oeuvres, which includes prosciutto draped over watermelon, garlicky white bean salad, and deliciously dressed carrots. Luscious lips eating spaghetti paper a dining room wall; imitate them by ordering spaghetti tumbled with tomato, pungent olives, garlic, and creamy mozzarella. The pastas are all excellent, and also include fusilli with pesto, ricotta-stuffed crepes (manicotti) in tomato sauce, and linguine with shrimp, olive oil, garlic, and chile flakes. Served hot from the pan, the crisply breaded boneless chicken breast arrives alla Milanese under a juicy tomato salad. Lamb ossa bucco with risotto and sea bass with olives and capers are other fine entrees. For dessert, just try to resist the individual (and huge) lemon meringue pies.
- Review by David Nelson, February 2011

Setting: A few outdoor tables glimpse downtown San Diego across the bay; indoors, sexy lips eating spaghetti adorn the wallpaper
Service: Professional, but friendly and un rushed
Best Dishes: Antipasto; all pastas; breaded chicken breast with tomato salad; lemon meringue pie
Dinner Prices: Starters, $10-$15 entrees, $13-$30 desserts, $7

Bon Appétit in San Diego

Alforon
5965 EI Cajon Boulevard
San Diego (619) 269-9904
www.alforon.com

Samia and George Salameh, the operators of one of San Diego's newest spots for budget-conscious diners, designed an attractive home-style decor for Alforon, their tiny storefront restaurant near the multiethnic City Heights district. The beamed ceiling and wrought iron chandelier evoke a home in 19th-century Lebanon, while the 21st-century menu of baked-to-order flatbreads with myriad Middle Eastern toppings are as familiar today as they would have been then. Hot, chewy, and delicious, the breads can be garnished simply with the spice blend called za' atar or elaborately with cheeses, vegetables, and meats, alone or in combination. Salads (one made with torn bread), appetizers of hummus and roasted eggplant. and crisp, honeyed baklava are other specialties of this charming little place.
- review by David Nelson, March 2011

Bon Appétit in San Diego

Mr. Dumpling
7250 Convoy Court
San Diego (858) 576-6888

Traditionally decorated and located a short distance from Convoy Street's Asian restaurant row. Mr. Dumpling serves nothing but Chinese hot pot dinners and varied, splendid dumplings. The sizable hot pot dinners are not cheap, but the affordable dumplings combine into luscious meals that set the chopsticks flying. Mostly priced at $5.99-$6.99 for an order of 10, the plump beauties burst with shrimp and cabbage, brightly seasoned fish, mixed vegetables, or pork with fragrant dill. Order them steamed and juicy or pan -fried and crisp. Mix a soy sauce-vinegar dip to taste, and punch up the flavor quotient with dribbles of chili oil. For dumplings in soup, try succulent shrimp and pork wonton swimming in an almost-spicy broth.
- review by David Nelson, March 2011

Bon Appétit in San Diego

Bud’s Louisiana Café
4320 Viewridge Avenue
San Diego (858) 573-2837
www.budscafe.com

San Diego Chef-owner Bud Deslatte describes his cuisine as "authentic Creole and Cajun," and his Bud's Louisiana Cafe promotes "great American food in the New Orleans manner." The Big Easy native's newest local eatery fills Monday through Saturday (closed Sunday) with avid fans of the seafood gumbo, which is jammed with crayfish tails, shrimp, crab, and andouille sausage. Filling Po' Boy sandwiches boast house made spreads: tangy remoulade with fried shrimp, barbecue-scented mayonnaise with pulled house-smoked pork shoulder, rich gravy with the sloppy roast beef sandwich, and so forth. A wedge of Creole pecan pie ends the party on a Mardi Gras note.
- review by David Nelson, March 2011

Preserve Your Memories

Do you back up your photos? If not, you might be on a slippery slope to heartache should your laptop get stolen or your hard drive die. Some people think that burning photos to a DVD will guard against calamity. That's partly true, and it's a good short-term remedy. But the older a DVD gets, the more likely it will fail. The best strategy results in three copies. Think of the original file on your hard drive as one copy. Make a second copy by backing up the data to an external medium. Back up to a flash drive or an external hard drive, or burn a DVD and store it off-site. You can use a backup service, such as Carbonite (carbonite.com), which uses a program on your computer to automatically back up your hard drive off-site, or you can upload pictures and videos to websites such as Flickr, or SmugMug. Getting into the habit of uploading your memories off-site will not only let you share your "Kodak moments" with friends and family, it will also guard against theft, fire, and even hardware failure.

$25 billion per Year

The OECD calculated that (in 2008) the US spent about $25 billion in foreign aid per year, although this is a very small percentage of the 2009 estimated federal government income of $2.7 trillion.

The current turmoil in Egypt is a primary example of this. Writes The American Conservative‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty: “The fact, rarely mentioned this past week, is that the United States sends over $800 million in direct economic aid to Egypt along with $1.3 billion a year in military aid. The guns being used to beat protestors this week were bought with American tax dollars.” Writing for Commentary, neoconservative Max Boot makes a similar observation: “For decades, Egypt has been one of the largest recipients of American foreign aid, and (Egyptian President) Mubarak has been one of our closest allies in the Middle East. Egyptian officers have been educated in the United States, its military and police forces are equipped with American weapons, and they regularly conduct exercises with American troops.”

Due to our constant foreign aid and intervention in Egypt’s affairs, Boot adds “We have a large say, whether we want it or not.” What nearly $30 billion in American aid to Egypt has purchased over the past three decades has been a tyranny that — according to classified U.S. diplomatic cables — engages in "routine and pervasive" torture and police brutality and a dictatorship that the Oval Office continues to defend even as the Egyptian regime is dissolving. Clearly, the U.S. has bought influence in the Mubarak regime, but that regime has become highly unpopular with the Egyptian people and stands poised to be no longer a factor politically.

Tea Party favorite and freshman Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) may have crossed a "third rail" of politics by suggesting that the federal government zero out all foreign aid. Rand Paul apparently has the American people on his side, as he noted in his interview with Blitzer that "Reuters did a poll — 71 percent of American people agree with me that when we're short of money, where we can't do the things we need to do in our country, we certainly shouldn't be shipping the money overseas." Actually, Paul slightly underestimated the opposition to foreign aid giveaways. The Reuters poll revealed that 73 percent of the American people want to eliminate foreign aid from the federal budget.

The point of foreign aid is not economics; it is geopolitics: It is intended to shape a recipient country’s behavior and, quite literally, buy American influence. And it does just that.

Read more:
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/us-foreign-aid.htm
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_foreign_aid_does_the_US_Government_give_away#ixzz1CplZM3Ii

One light bulb at a time

A physics teacher in high school, once told the students that while one grasshopper on the railroad tracks wouldn't slow a train very much, a billion of them would. In our current economic situation, every little thing we buy or do affects someone else - even their job.

Check this out. I can verify this because I was in Lowe's the other day for some reason and just for the heck of it I was looking at the hose attachments. They were all made in China. The next day I was in Home Depot and just for the heck of it I checked the hose attachments there. They were made in USA. Start looking..

My son likes Hershey's candy. I noticed, though, that it is made in Mexico. I do not buy it any more. My favorite toothpaste Colgate is made in Mexico, now I have switched to Crest. You have to read the labels on everything. This past weekend I was at Kroger. I needed 60W light bulbs and Bounce dryer sheets. I was in the light bulb aisle, and right next to the GE brand I normally buy was an off-brand labeled, "Everyday Value" I picked up both types of bulbs and compared the stats - they were the same except for the price. The GE bulbs were more money than the Everyday Value brand but the thing that surprised me the most was the fact that GE was made in MEXICO and the Everyday Value brand was made in USA by a company in Cleveland, Ohio. So throw out the myth that you cannot find products you use every day that are made right here.

So on to another aisle - Bounce Dryer Sheets. You guessed it, Bounce cost more money and is made in Canada. The Everyday Value brand was less money and MADE IN THE USA! I did laundry yesterday and the dryer sheets performed just like the Bounce Free I have been using for years and at almost half the price!

My challenge to you is to start reading the labels when you shop for everyday things and see what you can find that is made in the USA - the job you save may be your own or your neighbors! If you accept the challenge, pass this on to others so we can all start buying American, one light bulb at a time! Stop buying from overseas manufacturers!

Let's get with the program ... help our fellow Americans keep their jobs and create more jobs here in the U.S.A.

Paid Internship for Minority Students interested in Media - 15 February 2011

The Emma Bowen Foundation is recruiting for minority high school seniors and incoming college freshmen for PAID internships starting this summer. Students should have at least a 3.0 GPA, an interest in media and plan to attend a 4-year college. Selected students are paid and also receive a matching funds scholarship each summer to help pay for college expenses. Application deadline is 15 February 2011.

Please visit the website for more information and the application at www.emmabowenfoundation.com

The Constitution And Its Worshippers

by Jill Lepore

It is written in an elegant, clerical hand, on four sheets of parchment, each two feet wide and a bit more than two feet high, about the size of an eighteenth-century newspaper but finer, and made not from the pulp of plants but from the hide of an animal. Some of the ideas it contains reach across ages and oceans, to antiquity, more were, at the time, newfangled. 'We the People," the first three words of the preamble, are giant and Gothic: they slant left, and, because most of the rest of the words slant right, the writing zigzags. It took four months to debate and to draft, including two weeks to polish the prose, neat work done by a committee of style. By Monday, September 17, 1787, it was ready. That afternoon, the Constitution of the United States of America was read out loud in a chamber on the first floor of Pennsylvania's State House, where the delegates to the Federal Convention had assembled to subscribe their names to a new system of government, "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Then Benjamin Franklin rose from his chair, wishing to be heard. At eighty-one, he was too tired to make another speech, but he had written down what he wanted to say, and James Wilson, decades Franklin's junior, read his remarks, which were addressed to George Washington, presiding. "Mr. President," he began, "I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them." Franklin liked to swaddle argument with affability, as if an argument were a colicky baby, the more forceful his argument, the more tightly he swaddled it. What he offered was a well-bundled statement about changeability. I find that there are errors here, he explained, but, who knows, someday I might change my mind; I often do. "For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better Information, or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise." That people so often believe themselves to be right is no proof that they are; the only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England is that the former is infallible while the latter is never wrong. He hoped "that every member of the Convention who may still have Objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own Infallibility, and to make manifest our Unanimity, put his name to this Instrument." Although the document had its faults, he doubted that any other assembly would, at just that moment, have been able to draft a better one. "Thus I consent, Sk, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.” Three delegates refused to sign, but at the bottom of the fourth page appear the signatures of the rest. What was written on parchment was then made public, printed in newspapers and broadsheets, often with "We the People" set off in extra-large type. Meanwhile, the secretary of the convention carried the original to New York to present it to Congress, which met, at the time, at City Hall. Without either endorsing or opposing it, Congress agreed to forward the Constitution to the states, for ratification. The original Constitution was simply filed away and, later, shuffled from one place to another. When City Hall underwent renovations, the Constitution was transferred to the Department of State. The following year, it moved with Congress to Philadelphia and, in 1800, to Washington, where it was stored at the Treasury Department until it was shifted to the War Office. In 1814, three clerks stuffed it into a linen sack and carried it to a gristmill in Virginia, which was fortunate, because the British burned Washington down. In the eighteen-twenties, when someone asked James Madison where it was, he had no idea.

In 1875, the Constitution found a home in a tin box in the bottom of a closet in a new building that housed the Departments of State, War, and Navy. In 1894, it was sealed between glass plates and locked in a safe in the basement. In 1921, Herbert Putnam, a librarian, drove it across town in his Model T. In 1924, it was put on display in the Library of Congress, for the first time ever. Before then, no one had thought of that. It spent the Second World War at Fort Knox. In 1952, it was driven in an armored tank under military guard to the National Archives, where it remains, in a shrine in the rotunda, alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Ours is one of the oldest written constitutions in the world and the first, anywhere, to be submitted to the people for their approval. As Madison explained, the Constitution is "of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed . . . THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES." Lately, some say, it's been thrown in the trash. "Stop Shredding Our Constitution!" Tea Party signs read. "FOUND in a DUMPSTER behind the Capitol," read another, on which was pasted the kind of faux-parchment Constitution you can buy in the souvenir shop at any history-for-profit heritage site. I bought mine at Bunker Hill years back It is printed on a single sheet of foolscap, and the writing is so small that it's illegible; then again, the knickknack Constitution isn't meant to be read. The National Archives sells a poster-size scroll, twenty-two inches by twenty-nine inches, that is a readable facsimile of the first page, for twelve dollars and ninety-five cents. This item is currently out of stock.

Parchment is beautiful. As an object, the Constitution has more in common with the Dead Sea Scrolls than with what we now think of as writing: pixels floating on a screen, words suspended in a digital cloud, bubbles of text. R we the ppl? Our words are vaporous. Not so the Constitution. "I have this crazy idea that the Constitution actually means something,” one bumper sticker reads. Ye olde parchment serves as shorthand for everything old, real, durable, American, and true—a talisman held up against the uncertainties and abstractions of a meaningless, changeable, paperless age.

You can keep a constitution in your pocket, as Thomas Paine once pointed out. Pocket constitutions have been around since the seventeen-nineties. The Cato Institute prints ~a handsome Constitution, the size and appearance of a passport, available for four dollars and ninety-five cents. The National Center for Constitutional Studies, founded by W. Cleon Skousen, a rogue Mormon, John Bircher, and all-purpose conspiracy theorist, prints a stapled paper version, the dimensions of a datebook, thirty cents if you order a gross. I got mine, free, at a Tea Party meeting in Boston. Andrew Johnson, our first impeached President, was said to have waved around his pocket constitution so often that he resembled a newsboy hawking the daily paper. Crying constitution is a minor American art form. "This is my copy of the Constitution," John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. "And I'm going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'" Not to nitpick, but this is not the preamble to the Constitution. It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

At some forty-four hundred words, not counting amendments, our Constitution is one of the shortest in the world, but few Americans have read it. A national survey taken this summer reported that seventy-two per cent of about a thousand people polled had never once read all forty-four hundred words. This proves no obstacle to cherishing it; eighty-six per cent of respondents said that the Constitution has "an impact on their daily lives." The point of such surveys is that if more of us read the Constitution all of us would 'be better off; because we would demand that our elected officials abide by it, and we'd be able to tell when they weren't doing so and punish them accordingly. "This is what happens when our Constitution starts shaking her fist," Sarah Palin tweeted in October, about calls for an end to federal funding for National Public Radio, which she charged with violating the First Amendment by firing the commentator Juan Williams. "The American people's voice was heard at the ballot box," Boehner said on Election Night, and what the American people want is "a government that honors the Constitution." Rand Paul thanked his parents, in his victory speech, "for teaching me to respect our Constitution." Michelle Bachmann told ABC News that she plans to offer Constitution classes in the House. Glenn Beck asked his listeners to urge their representatives to join Bachmann's constitutional caucus. Sharron Angle said that she took comfort in the knowledge that Harry Reid carries a copy of the Constitution in his breast pocket: 'We want our senator to remember our Constitution, to read our Constitution, and to consider every bill that he votes for in light of that Constitution." The Tea Party's triumph, she said, amounts to this: 'We've inspired a nation to take a look at that document and begin to read it." Last week, when new lawmakers were sworn in, the Constitution was read out loud in the House of Representatives. It is the first time this has ever happened.

If you haven't read the Constitution lately, do. Chances are you'll find that it doesn't exactly explain itself. Consider Article III, Section 3: "The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted." This is simply put—hats off to the committee of style— but what does it mean? A legal education helps. Lawyers won't stumble over "attainder," even if the rest of us will. Part of the problem might appear to be the distance between our locution and theirs. "Corruption of Blood"? The document's learnedness and the changing meaning of words isn't the whole problem, though, because the charge that the Constitution is too difficult for ordinary people to understand—not because of its vocabulary but because of the complexity of its ideas—was brought nearly the minute it was made public. Anti-Federalists charged that the Constitution was so difficult to read that it amounted to a conspiracy against the understanding of a plain man, that it was willfully incomprehensible. "The constitution of a wise and free people, ought to be as evident to simple reason, as the letters of our alphabet," an Anti-Federalist wrote. "A constitution ought to be, like a beacon, held up to the public eye, so as to be understood by every man," Patrick Henry argued. He believed that what was drafted in Philadelphia was "of such an intricate and complicated nature, that no man on this earth can know its real operation." Anti-Federalists had more complaints, too, which is why ratification—a process wonderfully recounted by Pauline Maier in "Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788"—was touch and go. Rhode Island, the only state to hold a popular referendum on the Constitution, rejected it. Elsewhere, in state ratifying conventions, the Constitution passed by the narrowest of margins: eightv-nine to seventy-nine in Virginia, thirty to twenty-seven in New York, a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred and sixty-eight in Massachusetts.

Nor were complaints that the Constitution is obscure silenced by ratification. In a 1798 essay called "The Key of Liberty," William Manning, the plainest of men—a New England farmer, a Revolutionary veteran, and the father of thirteen children—expressed a view widely held by Jeffersonian Republicans: "The Federal Constitution by a fair construction is a good one prinsapaly, but I have no doubt but that the Convention who made it intended to destroy our free governments by it, or they never would have spent 4 Months in making such an inexpliset thing." Franklin called the Constitution an "instrument"; he meant that it was a legal instrument, like a will. Manning thought that it was another kind of instrument: "It was made like a Fiddle, with but few Strings, but so that the ruling Majority could play any tune upon it they please." For all the charges that the Constitution was difficult to understand, between 1789 and 1860 only one state, California, required that it be taught in school. The first textbooks examining the Constitution weren't printed until the eighteen-twenties, and they were for law students. Three volumes of "Commentaries on the Constitution," written by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, appeared in 1833. The next year, Story published an abridgment for schools, explaining that the Constitution "is the language of the People, to be judged of according to the common sense, and not by mere theoretical reasoning." That may be, but Story's schoolbook is a hundred and sixty-six pages of close legal argument.

You can't explain a thing without interpreting it. Story, a Northerner and a nationalist, emphasized the Supreme Court's role in arbitrating disputes between the federal government and the states. In those years, the disputes mainly had to do with slavery, Southerners who glossed the Constitution stressed state sovereignty. In 1846, William Hickey published a constitutional concordance. He got the idea from Polk's Vice-President, George Dallas, who believed the Constitution prohibited Congress from interfering with the extension of slavery into Western territories. The U.S. Senate, over which Dallas presided, ordered twelve thousand copies of Hickey's pro-slavery vade mecum. It does not appear to have elevated congressional conversation. In 1847, the governor of New York, Silas Wright, observed, "No one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity ... to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient."

By the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly all white men could vote. Not all of them could read, and not all of them owned a copy of the Constitution, but Daniel Webster insisted, "Almost every man in the country is capable of reading it." Whether they did or not is hard to say. Some did more than read it. William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution at an abolitionist rally in Massachusetts, calling it a "covenant with death, an agreement with hell." John Brown wrote his own constitution, replacing "We the people" with "We, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people ... who have no rights." It was found on Brown's body when he was captured at Harpers Ferry. William Grimes, a fugitive slave, had a different idea about what to do with the Constitution: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious, happy and free America." And then the American people went to war, over their different ways of reading letters inked on parchment and wounds cut into the skin of a black man's back.

"Find It in the Constitution," the Tea Party rally signs read. Forty-four hundred words and "God" is not one of them, as Benjamin Rush complained to John Adams, hoping for an emendation: "Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments." It was not. "White" isn't in the Constitution, but Senator Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, was still sure that the federal government was "made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever." What about black men? "They are not included, and were not intended to be included," the Supreme Court ruled, in 1857. Railroads, slavery, banks, women, free markets, privacy, health care, wiretapping: not there. "There is nothing in the United States Constitution that gives the Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court the right to declare that white and colored children must attend the same public schools," Senator James Eastland, of Mississippi, said, after Brown v. Board of Education. "Have You Ever Seen the Words Forced Busing in the Constitution?" read a sign carried in Boston in 1975. 'Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" Christine O'Donnell asked Chris Coons during a debate in October. When Coons quoted the First Amendment, O'Donnell was flabbergasted: 'That's in the First Amendment?" Left-wing bloggers slapped their thighs; Coons won the election in a landslide. But the phrase "separation of church and state" really isn't in the Constitution or in any of the amendments.

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out. Felix Frankfurter once wrote that the Constitution "is most significantly not a document but a stream of history." The difference between forty-four hundred words and a stream of history goes a long way toward accounting for the panics, every few decades or so, that the Constitution is in crisis, and that America must return to constitutional principles through constitutional education. The two sides in this debate are always charging each other with not knowing the Constitution, but they are talking about different kinds of knowledge.

"We’ll keep clinging to our Constitution, our guns, and our religion," Palin said last spring, "and you can keep the change." Behind the word "change" is the word "evolution." In 1913, Woodrow Wilson insisted, "All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when 'development,’ 'evolution,' is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is a recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing." Conservatives called for a rejection of this nonsense about the "living Constitution." In 1916, the Sons of the American Revolution campaigned for Constitution Day. In 1919, the National Association for Constitutional Government published some fifty thousand copies of a pocket edition of the Constitution. (The association's other publications included an investigation into the influence of socialists in American colleges.) In 1921, Warren Harding called the Constitution divinely inspired; it was Harding who ordered the Librarian of Congress to take the parchment out of storage and put it into a shrine. Soon, the National Security League was distributing free copies of reactionary books written by "Mr. Constitution," James Montgomery Beck, who was Harding's solicitor general. "The Constitution is in graver danger today than at any other time in the history of America," Beck warned.

By 1923, twenty-three states required constitutional instruction and, by 1931, forty-three. Studying Middletown's high school in 1929, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd found these classes worrying: "70 percent of the boys and 75 percent of the girls answered 'false' to the statement 'A citizen of the United States should be allowed to say anything he pleases, even to advocate violent revolution, if he does no violent act himself.'" Still, such instruction was by no means uniformly conservative. The author of an elementary-school textbook published in 1930 wrote, "This Constitution is yours, boys and girls of America, to cherish and to obey, to preserve and, if need be, to better."

The New Deal intensified debate over the nature of the Constitution, a debate whose cramped terms we've inherited. "Hopeful people today wave the flag," Thurman Arnold, later F.D.R.'s assistant attorney general, wrote in 1935. "Timid people wave the Constitution . . . the only bulwark against change." Obama supporters wore "HOPE" and "CHANGE" T-shirts; Tea Partiers carry the Constitution. Liberals argue for progress; conservatives argue for a return to the nation's founding principles. Change is a founding principle, too, but people divided by schism are blind to what they share: one half, infallible; the other, never wrong.

Pop quiz, from a test administered by the Hearst Corporation in 1987.
True or False: The following phrases are found in the U.S. Constitution:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
"The consent of the governed."
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
"All men are created equal."
"Of the people, by the people, for the people."
This is what's known as a trick question. None of these phrases are in the Constitution. Eight in ten Americans believed, like Boehner, that "all men are created equal" was in the Constitution. Even more thought that "of the people, by the people, for the people" was in the Constitution. (Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, 1863.) Nearly five in ten thought "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was written in Philadelphia in 1787. (Karl Marx, 1875.)

About a quarter of American voters are what political scientists call, impoliticly, "know nothings," meaning that they possess almost no general knowledge of the workings of their government, at least according to studies conducted by the American National Election Survey since 1948, during which time the know-nothing rate has barely budged. Critics, including James L. Gibson and Gregory A. Caldeira, have charged that these studies systemically overestimate political ignorance. A 2000 survey asked interviewees to identify William Rehnquist's job. The only correct answer was "the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court." Answers like "Chief Justice," "Justice," "Chief Justice of the Court," and anything breezier ("a Supreme Court judge who is the head honcho") were marked incorrect. Why the ability to name Rehnquist's job is necessary to good citizenship is never made clear. Those surveys seem to have had a point to prove—they have been used to argue, for instance, that the public ought not to play a role in electing or selecting judges—as did surveys conducted during the Cold War which appear to have been designed to elicit the headline-generating news that Americans are so ignorant of the Constitution that they can be gulled into confusing it with Marxism. "Americans have known the Constitution best when they have revered it least," Michael Kammen wrote, in an extraordinarily rich and rewarding history of the Constitution, published in 1986. The Hearst report reached quite a different conclusion: "Those Americans who are most knowledgeable about the Constitution are the least likely to support changes." In 1985 and 1986, Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese, made a series of speeches advocating originalism. Reagan nominated Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court in June of 1986. The Hearst survey was conducted that fall and released in February of 1987. That May, Thurgood Marshall said, in a bicentennial address, I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention." That July, Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Court, and, despite the failure of Bork's nomination, originalism never looked back.

Last February, Meese and a coalition of prominent conservatives, including leaders of the Heritage Foundation, The National Review, and the Federalist Society, met in Virginia to sign "The Mount Vernon Statement." It calls for a coalition of social, economic, and national-security conservatives to return the nation to the principles stated in its founding documents, now "under sustained attack" in "our culture, our universities and our politics": "The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant." The Mount Vernon Statement was modelled on the Sharon Statement, signed in 1960. The threat to the Constitution, in the Sharon Statement, was a "menace," and it came from "the forces of international Communism." In the Mount Vernon version, the threat is "change": change is "an empty promise'' and "a dangerous deception," and it comes from the American people—that is, from those of us who are to be found in the nation's universities and the federal government. The Sharon Statement was signed in William F. Buckley, Jr.'s home, in Sharon, Connecticut. The organizers of the Mount Vernon Statement wanted to meet at Mount Vernon, but the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association turned them down. Still, the statement was printed on fake parchment, and a guy dressed up as George Washington handed out Sharpies.

Originalists argue that originalism is the only faithfully democratic mode of constitutional interpretation. Laws are passed by the elected representatives of the people; the courts protect the will of the people by making sure those laws adhere to the Constitution, as originally drafted and popularly ratified. Any other mode of jurisprudence is overstepping, and amounts to an abuse of judicial power because it favors the rulings of un-elected judges—the caprice of contemporary courts—against the will of the people, as embodied by the Constitution. Liberal legal scholars have tried different approaches in countering this argument. One has been to point out that the American people whose will originalism protects are dead, and that, even if they weren't, they aren't us. "If democratic legitimacy is the measure of a sound constitutional interpretive practice," the Columbia law professor Jamal Greene has written, "then Justice Scalia needs to give an account of why and how rote obedience to the commitments of voters two centuries distant and wildly different in racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural composition can be justified on democratic grounds."

Another approach has been to argue that originalism, so far from being original, in the sense of being the same age as those four sheets of parchment in the National Archives, is quite modern. Consider the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Historical evidence can be marshalled to support different interpretations of these words, and it certainly has been. But the Yale law professor Reva Siegel has argued that, for much of the twentieth century, legal scholars, judges, and politicians, both conservative and liberal, commonly understood the Second Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form militias—as narrow a right as the protection provided by the Third Amendment against the government's forcing you to quarter troops in your house. Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, lawyers for the National Rifle Association, concerned about gun-control laws passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, argued that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms—and that this represented not a changing interpretation but a restoration of its original meaning. The N.R.A., which had never before backed a Presidential candidate, backed Ronald Reagan in 1980. As late as 1989, even Bork could argue that the Second Amendment works "to guarantee the right of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms." In an interview in 1991, the former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the N.R.A.'s interpretation of the Second Amendment was "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

The individual-rights argument warrants serious debate. But, instead, on the political stage, people who disagreed with it were accused of failing to respect the Constitution, or of being too stupid to understand it. In 1995, Newt Gingrich wrote, "Liberals neither understand nor believe in the Constitutional right to bear arms." Who are the know-nothings now? Liberal scholars and jurists. In 2005, Mark Levin, a talk-radio host who worked under Meese in the Reagan Justice Department, wrote that Thurgood Marshall, who had challenged originalism, "couldn't have had a weaker grasp of the Constitution." In 2008, the N.R.A.'s argument about the Second Amendment was made law in the District of Columbia v. Heller, which ruled as unconstitutional a gun-control law passed in D.C. in 1968. This decision, Siegel argues, has more to do with Charlton Hes-ton than with James Madison.

In 2004, Larry D. Kramer, the dean of Stanford Law School, argued not against originalism but against judicial review (a power wielded, in recent years, by an originalist Court). Kramer offered another jurisprudence, based on different historical claims: popular constitutionalism. "The Supreme Court is not the highest authority in the land on constitutional law," Kramer wrote. "We are." Critics charge that it's unclear how popular constitutionalism works, but the opposition of white activists to school desegregation, the N.R.A.'s interpretation of the Second Amendment, and Iowans voting out of office judges who supported same-sex marriage would all seem to fit into this category, and if recent legislation is overturned by an incoming Congress elected by people who believe that legislation to be unconstitutional, that will be popular constitutionalism, too.

Originalism is popular. Four in ten Americans favor it. Not all Tea Partiers are originalists, but the movement is fairly described as a populist movement inclined toward originalism. The populist appeal of originalism overlaps with that of heritage tourism: both collapse the distance between past and present and locate virtue in an imaginary eighteenth century where "the people" and "the elite" are perfectly aligned in unity of purpose. Originalism, which has no purchase anywhere but here, has a natural affinity with some varieties of Protestantism, and the United States differs from all other Western democracies in the far greater proportion of its citizens who believe in the literal truth of the Bible. Although originalism is a serious and influential mode of constitutional interpretation, Greene has argued that it is also a political product manufactured by the New Right and marketed to the public by talk radio, cable television, and the Internet, where it enjoys a competitive advantage over other varieties of constitutional interpretation, partly because it's the easiest.

An unexamined question at the heart of this debate, then, is how people actually read the Constitution. Many people are now reading it, with earnestness and dedication, often in reading groups modelled on Bible study groups. The Tea Party Express endorses "The Constitution Made Easy," a translation into colloquial English made by Michael Holler, and available on Holler's Web site for eight dollars and ninety-five cents. Holler studied at Biola University, a Christian college offering a Biblically centered education. Much of his translation, which appears side by side with the original, is forthright. His Article III, Section 3, reads, "Congress will have Power to declare the punishment for treason, but the penalty may not include confiscating a person s property after that person is executed," and, in an end note, he supplies the helpful information that "Corruption of Blood" refers to the common-law confiscation of the property of executed traitors, which "had the effect of punishing the traitor's heirs, or bloodline." Holler's Second Amendment is less straightforward; he inverts the language of the original, so that it reads, "The people have the right to own and carry firearms, and it may not be violated because a well-equipped Militia is necessary for a State to remain secure and free." Holler is an N.R.A.-certified handgun instructor who, in addition to offering courses on the Constitution, sells classes in how to obtain a concealed-handgun permit.

"U.S. Constitution for Dummies," published in 2009, was written by Michael Armheim, an English barrister. The book includes a foreword by Ted Cruz, a nationally prominent defender of the death penalty and a former solicitor general of Texas who successfully defended a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Texas State Capitol. More recently, Cruz authored an amicus brief, on behalf of thirty-one states, supporting the anti-gun-control argument in the District of Columbia v. Heller. Arnheim's "plain-English guide" translates portions of the Constitution (e.g., "Due process is really just an old-fashioned way of saying 'proper procedure'"), with an emphasis on contemporary controversies, which he frames as battles between "judge-made law" and the proper workings of democracy; the right to privacy, for instance, is an example of judge-made law. Arnheim is not stinting with his views. "In my opinion," he writes, "same-sex marriage in Massachusetts is unconstitutional, and the other states therefore don't have to recognize such unions. I am available if anyone wants to take this issue to the U.S. Supreme Court!"

Two more new guides include both scholarly annotations and historical essays. Jack Rakove, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Stanford, has prepared "The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence." Rakove wrote an amicus brief in Heller, opposing the position argued by Cruz, but here he goes no farther than to call the evidence for Cruz's position "tenuous." Richard Beeman, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the editor of a small-trim, twelve-dollar paperback, "The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution." In his commentary on Heller, the laudably equable Beeman summarizes the arguments; shrugs ("The meaning of the Second Amendment is subject to varying interpretations"); and moves on. Both of these excellent guides are valuable and judicious. Neither defines "Corruption of Blood."

I never knew what the Constitution really is until I read Mr. Beck's book," a sly critic of James Montgomery Beck once wrote. “You can read it without thinking." Critics of originalism are in a bind. When ideas are reduced to icons, which, unfortunately, is the ordinary state of affairs, constitutionalism and originalism look exactly the same: the faux parchment stands for both. But originalism and constitutionalism are not the same, and the opposite of original is not unconstitutional. Originalism is one method of constitutional interpretation. Popular originalism is originalism scrawled with Magic Markers, on poster board. The N.R.A. opposed gun-control laws. It argued, at length, and over years, that those laws violated the Second Amendment. Eventually, the Supreme Court agreed. So far, the Tea Party's passions ignite faster and are stated more simply. A sign at a Tea Party rally in Temecula, California: 'Impeach Obama: He's Unconstitutional."

The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events— over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone's. It is the rule of law, the opinions of the Court, the stripes on William Grimes's back, a shrine in the National Archives, a sign carried on the Washington Mall, and the noise all of us make when we disagree. If the Constitution is a fiddle, it is also all the music that has ever been played on it. Some of that music is beautiful; much of it is humdrum; some of it sounds like hell.

Reprinted from The New Yorker, 17 Jan 2011, p.70

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Giving and Getting: Philanthropy among African American Fraternities

by Gasman, Louison, and Barnes

The story of African American fraternities began in 1905 in Ithaca, New York, on Cornell's bitterly cold and racially intolerant campus. Pressured to "ascend" the "proscriptions of color common to American institutions of this era, and hampered by limited means of the average 'poor' student," the founders of the nations oldest intercollegiate black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, "faced the future and boldly endeavored to find a way out of their difficulties, scarcely realizing, however, the import of their action on subsequent generations".[70] Whether they found themselves stranded on historically white college campuses in New York, Indiana, or Ohio or among their own people in Washington, D.C., or Baltimore, the founders of each fraternity set out to establish a mission and adhered to the basic principles of education, political involvement, and economic empowerment to advance the race.

Initiates of Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi, Omega Psi Phi, Phi Beta Sigma, and Iota Phi Theta have, from their organizations' inception, taken solemn oaths to serve one another and humankind.[71] The modus operandi of each fraternity is expressed clearly in its motto. Thus, the Kappas aim is to produce "achievement in every field of human endeavor." The Omega knows that "friendship is essential to the soul" and uses it to serve others.. Establishing a "culture for service and service for humanity" is the Sigma's creed. The Iota believes in "building a tradition, not resting one" as he works to advance social change. Being "servants to all" is what Alphas strive to do.[72]

This review of philanthropy in black fraternities highlights the historical models that the five organizations have used to increase blacks' participation in education, engage them in political processes, stimulate their entrepreneurial ambitions, and establish a tradition of giving through fraternity-based foundations. We point to the driving influences behind their philanthropy, noting why and how black fraternities have given support to the greater good.

MODELS OF PHILANTHROPY

In fraternity histories, the formation of "movements," or what would later be called "national programs," was often a response to the crisis of the day or the vision fraternity men had for future generations.[73] It is important to remem¬ber that during the earliest years of black fraternities, between 1906 and 1914, black men and women had limited access to higher education. Few African Americans were aware of the benefits of higher education, and discrimination was widespread.[74]

The black fraternities' methods for solving what many referred to as the "Negro problem" focused on balancing inequities in public and private education, creating businesses, participating in political processes, establishing foundations, and building strategic alliances. Early debates routinely questioned the efficacy and sustainability of responding to fraternal and community calls for action. These debates, however, helped lay permanent foundations on which future generations of fraternity men could stand and thus advance themselves, their families, their communities, and their fraternities.[75]

Within black fraternities, philanthropic endeavors typically began at the local level and spread throughout each organization with the aid of national conclaves and conferences. Iota Phi Theta places this fact in the proper perspective on its national Web site: "In the initial stages of the Fraternity's existence, the Fraternity's service initiatives were local in nature as reflected by the size of the Fraternity and the scope of its resources. As the Fraternity began to take on a national dimension, it became evident that its programmatic thrust would have to be adjusted accordingly. This adjustment was complicated however, by the fact that many chapters have had historical ties to service organizations and causes in their local areas."[76] Tremendous overlap in philanthropic focus exists across each fraternity. Also, it is important to note that each organization awards scholarships to members and nonmembers at the chapter, district or state, and national levels, amounting to millions of dollars spent on African American education. No one fraternity concentrates on only one national initiative, and efforts often overlap within chapters.

EDUCATIONAL ENDEAVORS

The brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha agree that a college education is the "single best predictor of future economic success."[77] As such, they developed the national Go-to-High School, Go-to-College campaign in 1920, which used speakers, pamphlets, and personal letters to advertise the benefits of a college education.[78] Today, Alphas deliver their message year-round through a curriculum that concentrates on time management, study skills, goal setting, violence and conflict prevention, building self-esteem, historical perspectives of African and African American peoples, gender in society and current events.[79]

Omega Psi Phi's national talent search awards scholarships to young people each year. The search began in the fraternity's Sixth District, which covers North and South Carolina. Since 1953, Omegas have organized talent contests in local communities and at their national conclaves.[80] Likewise, Phi Beta Sigma "focuses on programming and services to graduates and undergraduates in the fraternity" through its National Education Program.[81] Tutoring, scholarship awards, and lectures are its core objectives.[82]

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Before the Great Depression, and before the discovery of "black capitalism" and the federal Office of Minority Business Enterprise in the late 1960s, the fraternity men of Sigma introduced the "Bigger and Better Negro Business" exhibition in 1924 to showcase to members and the public the achievements of the race. At the first convention in Philadelphia, more than twenty-five leading black businesses entered more than fifty exhibits. The response from local visitors was supportive, and as a result, the fraternity voted unanimously in 1925 to make "Bigger and Better Negro Business" a regular program. This program is consistent with Phi Beta Sigmas commitment to improving the economic conditions of minorities and the welfare of society at large.[83] Today, the programs mission includes "the promotion and fostering of ideas for the effective organization, improvement and expansion of business and the dissemination and propagation of information for the advancement of sound business principles and practices."[84] Partnering with organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, Sigma offers financial and home ownership information to its members and their families through its Project SEED (Sigma Economic Empowerment Development). It also runs "an all-volunteer board, manager and staff" credit union for "the blue and white family" of Sigmas and the women of Zeta Phi Beta.[85] Deposits in the credit union are insured up to $100,000, and it provides low-cost mortgages for fraternity and sorority members, as well as loans for home improvement, education, and weddings.

COMBATING IGNORANCE AND INDIFFERENCE

An old joke asks: "What's the difference between ignorance and indifference?" The answer: "I don't know and I don't care." Each fraternal organization has endeavored to inform communities about pressing social issues that must be addressed through political and legislative processes, including getting people out to vote in local, state, and national elections.

Social action is the term most of the fraternities use to describe activities aimed at registering voters and increasing their knowledge of political issues.[86] Alpha Phi Alpha professes that "A Voteless People Is a Hopeless People." Its campaign began in the 1930s and was led by chapters across the country. Over the years, the Alphas have maintained and strengthened their belief in the power of voting.[87] In fact, in 2005 they began an effort to raise awareness of the expiration of the Voting Rights Act. Members of the organization testified before Congress and worked in local communities to educate African Americans about the importance of the act's reauthorization.[88] Likewise, the brothers of Omega Psi Phi are dedicated to a national platform aimed at increasing political involvement and voting. According to the national office, "all levels of the fraternity are expected to facilitate, participate and/or coordinate activities that will uplift their communities through the power of the vote."[89]

HEALTH MATTERS

Another way the fraternities work to combat ignorance and educate the African American community is through their health-related initiatives. For example, Omega Psi Phi chapters aim to uplift their local communities through the promotion of good health practices. Specifically, the chapters participate in the Charles Drew Blood Drive each June, the American Diabetes Association, and several HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives.[90] This last effort is particularly important because African Americans represent 50 percent of all new AIDS cases in the United States.[91] Phi Beta Sigma chapters, like the Omegas, spend considerable time raising money and educating their local communities on issues that are detrimental to the health of African Americans, such as diabetes.[92]

Eliminating health disparities in the black community has been a major thrust for fraternal organizations. In 2002, Iota Phi Theta launched a national Sickle Cell Anemia Awareness Campaign with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. According to Scott Seward, Iota Phi Thetas Pennsylvania state director, "Children are a significant reason for me to do community service. My chapter has donated several thousand dollars to the St. Jude's Cancer Foundation for Children."[93]

Alpha Phi Alpha forms a national partnership with the March of Dimes each year. Both organizations work cooperatively to educate teenagers about sexual health and responsibility. Males and, in some cases, females between the ages of twelve and fifteen participate in workshops designed to let them explore their attitudes about their sexuality, increase their awareness of sexually transmitted diseases, and improve their self-esteem. Also, both organizations raise funds for research on birth defects and educational programs through Walk America. "Every day 1 in 8 babies born in the U.S. arrives too soon," reports the March of Dimes.[94] Alpha brothers team up and engage in fraternal competitions to determine which chapter can raise the most funds and get the most members to participate in the walk.

JOINT EFFORTS

Over the years, fraternities have partnered with national nonprofit organizations and well-known for-profit corporations to advance their fraternal missions. In some cases, the fraternities were invited to participate in the development of nationwide programs and strategies to deliver educational curricula and resources aimed at reducing the plight of low- to moderate-income communities.

Iota men help communities "succeed in a digital age" through a joint effort with Africana.com and Microsoft Corporation to bridge the digital divide. The digital divide has been described as a social, racial, class, and even political problem in society that further separates the haves from the have-nots with regard to technology and information access. In 2001, Iota men set out to deliver black culture and history to schools through Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah's Africana Encyclopedia and Microsoft's Encarta Africana, the CD-ROM version.[95]

The preponderance of single-parent households is a critical issue in urban and rural communities. National organizations such as the Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America have sought to ease the stress in these homes by provid¬ing children with "Bigs" to serve as mentors, counselors, and guides. In 1990, Alpha Phi Alpha signed an agreement with Big Brothers/Big Sisters to assist in its efforts to create environments where single parents and their children can increase their growth options and opportunities.[96] The fraternity also partnered with the Boy Scouts of America to create additional opportunities for boys to receive career guidance from accomplished black males.

Fraternities have partnered with or donated to the causes of such organizations as the NAACP, National Urban League, and United Negro College Fund. Omega Psi Phi has an extensive history of giving to these organizations. At Omega Psi Phi’s Los Angeles Grand Conclave in 1955, it was decided that "each graduate chapter would purchase a Life Membership from the NAACP," and "between 1955 and 1959, chapters contributed nearly $40,000" to the organization.[97] In the 1980s, the fraternity contributed $250,000 to the United Negro College Fund and authorized an "annual gift of 50,000 dollars to that organization in perpetuity."[98]

PERSONAL AND GROUP DEVOTION

Determining what drives people to give of their time, talents, and treasures to help others is no easy task. Although there are many reasons why a person might express a philanthropic spirit, it is clear that purpose is what drives black fraternity men. They connect on a number of levels with the missions of their organizations. Isaac Fraisier, an Omega Psi Phi brother for fifty-plus years, says his fraternity encourages him to "produce a better society where there are more and better young people being prepared to become leaders. It's an inward feeling that I get when I'm helping Omega to be the best. You are a servant of the community."[99] Fraisier has been a dues-paying member since he was initiated in 1949 on the campus of Claflin College. Born in 1925, he is currently a very active member of Nu Alpha Graduate Chapter in Charleston, South Carolina.

Iota Phi Theta member Scott Seward remarks, "My inspiration to serve comes from the knowledge that somebody will be better educated or better prepared in life because of my efforts and the efforts of my brothers. There is no other reason why I do this than the promotion and positive movement of the black race."[100] Seward was initiated at West Chester University in Pennsylvania in 2001 and is thirty years old. He is a member of the Chi Omega Chapter in Philadelphia.

Although the black church has often been cited as a reason for participating in philanthropic activities, some members do not understand this notion. According to Seward, "I am a Christian. I don't believe there is a spiritual influence in this work. Some of the [philosophies] connect with my fraternity's ideals, but I don't confuse them. We have partnered with churches and faith-based organizations on several occasions. It helps promote our brothers' work to people we wouldn't connect with through our other events and community service efforts." On the campuses of black colleges and universities, religion was a strong influence in the development of a service orientation. According to Fraisier, "Claflin was supported by the Methodist Church. The president demanded that everyone put on clean shirts and pants, and line up to go to church every Sunday. We marched with the Deltas to the church. Service wasn't a hard thing for me to do because of my background. It was a demanding sort of thing at Claflin."[101]

Since pledging was officially abolished in 1990, the fraternities have put service at the core of their process to initiate new members.[102] In all cases, "aspirants" are required to design and implement a community service project or program during the orientation period. Some believe that membership intake does not instill philanthropic values, but others disagree. "After some members pay for membership and use up their advanced payment, they don't come around anymore, and are not to be counted on to give time and money" said Fraisier. He continued, "It depends on brothers that sponsor new members to help them embrace that promotion [philanthropy]." Seward has a different point of view: "When service projects are properly implemented, intakes get to see that philanthropy is second nature for a brother. When they're done improperly, it has a negative effect and intakes see service as a chore. I believe engaging intakes in the service project or fund-raising development process helps him to better understand that this is our fraternity’s primary purpose, and it’s what's most important to the brotherhood." According to Seward, "Tradition goes hand in hand with philanthropy."[103] Each fraternity prides itself on what it has done to serve others. Service is their raison d'etre. Each of their creation stories points to a void that was present in their communities and the steps they took to improve themselves and society. Tradition is a powerful influence in the black fraternity, especially among the more senior members.

In addition to the imperatives to give, there are certainly factors that have a negative impact on giving. Membership fees and dues at the chapter and national levels have the potential to dampen the philanthropic spirit. "Even though it's sad to say, membership fees, local and national dues, and convention costs have a negative effect on the willingness and ability of a member to donate money to scholarship causes," Seward observed. Established members are more likely to make direct donations to scholarship funds. These members are typically alumni who have achieved a modicum of success in their careers. Fraisier points to economic reality when he says: "Young people in the fraternity are still in debt after graduating from college. They have small children, mortgages, etc. That situation has a negative effect on their ability to give time and money, but sometimes they manage to do it. More established alumni brothers are different altogether."[104] Socioeconomic background, lifestyle, living arrangements, and even hobbies are all factors in a fraternity member s ability and willingness to participate in his organization. There are many more reasons that push and pull these men to give up the things that matter to them to help others.

It is evident that BGLOs play an intensely significant role in American philanthropy, specifically in the lives of African Americans. As demonstrated, in formal and informal ways, black sororities and fraternities have worked to serve and shape their local, regional, and national communities. Too often, the work of these organizations has been overlooked by historians and scholars with little access to organizational papers and key stakeholders. As noted, this is often due to the secretive nature of these organizations. However, through the scholarship of insiders and those who are willing to invest the time, a rich, wonderful story of love of humankind can be told. Telling this story is essential to establishing the relevance of BGLOs, especially in light of recent criticism surrounding hazing issues. The African American community and the general public need to be made aware of the multilayered, complex history and operation of BGLOs in order to have a more informed understanding of their contributions to society.

Excerpt from Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the 21st Century
edited by Gregory S. Parks. University Press of Kentucky, 2008. p.197-209.

Notes

70. Charles H. Wesley, The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in College Life (Baltimore: Foundation Publishers, 1996), 15.
71. Brown et al., African American Fraternities and Sororities.
72. Ibid.; Herman Dreer, The History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity: A Brotherhood of Negro College Men, 1911-1939 (Washington, D.C.: Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, 1940); W. S. Savage and L. D. Reddick, Our Cause Speeds On: An Informal History of the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity (Atlanta: Fuller Press, 1957); John Slade, The Centaur Rising: Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc.: Ascending to the Next Millennium (Washington, D.C.: Nations
Capital Publishers, 1999).
73. McKenzie, "Community Service and Social Action”.
74. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).
75. Brown et al., African American Fraternities and Sororities; Walter Kimbrough, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).
76. Iota Phi Theta Web site, www.iotaphitheta.org (accessed April 9, 2006).
77. Go-to-High-School, Go-to-College curriculum guide, www.alphaphialpha.net (accessed April 8, 2006).
78. Wesley, History of Alpha Phi Alpha.
79. Ross, The Divine Nine.
80. Dreer, History of Omega Psi Phi. a .
81. Phi Beta Sigma national Web site, www.pbs1914.org (accessed 27 April 2006).
82. Welton Scott, History of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity (Savannah, Ga.: Savannah State College, 1970).
83. Ibid.; Phi Beta Sigma Web site, www.pbs1914.org.
84. Phi Beta Sigma Web site, www.pbs1914.org.
85. Ibid.
86. McKenzie, "Community Service and Social Action."
87. Wesley, History of Alpha Phi Alpha.
88. Alpha Phi Alpha Web site, www.alphphialpha.net (accessed 30 April 2006).
89. Omega Psi Phi Web site, www.oppf.org (accessed 30 April 2006).
90. Ibid.; Dreer, History of Omega Psi Phi; Robert Gill, The Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and the Men Who Make Its History (Washington, D.C.: Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, 1940).
91. Centers for Disease Control, www.cdc.gov (accessed 30 April 2006).
92. Savage and Reddick, Our Cause Speeds On.
93. Scott Seward, written response to survey questions.
94. March of Dimes corporate Web site, www.marchofdimes.com (accessed 29 April 2006).
95. Iota Phi Theta Web site, www.iotaphitheta.org.
96. Alpha Phi Alpha Web site, www.alphaphialpha.net.
97. Gill, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity; Omega Psi Phi Web site, www.oppf.org.
98. Omega Psi Phi Web site, www.oppf.org.
99. Isaac Fraisier, telephone interview with Mark Barnes, 9 March 2006.
100. Seward, written response to survey questions.
101. Ibid.; Fraisier interview.
102. Brown et al., African American Fraternities and Sororities.
103. Fraisier interview; Scott Seward, interview with Mark Barnes, 9 March 2006.
104. Seward interview; Fraisier interview.