Mo' Colored

Oprah and Obama (no additional names necessary) hit the campaign trail this weekend. I saw clips of them speaking at a rally in South Carolina, attended mostly by black people. For some reason both parties feel it's necessary to take on a speech pattern that sound more down-home, or, if you will, black.

Has anyone else noticed this? And does it annoy you as much as it does me? I've seen Oprah slip into dialect occasionally on her show (especially if she's interviewing someone black), but at least she's not running for office. When a political candidate changes his manner of speaking to suit the audience, it rings phony to me. There's no drawl in Obama's voice when he's involved in a debate. The man doesn't even have southern roots, for crying out loud.

Personally, I think this sort of thing will backfire on them, and I wish they'd both cut it out and speak like they normally do.

TGIF

In the blogosphere this week: Author Gammy Singer has a column about some really bad metaphors on the Crime Sistahs blog a few days ago. It's hilarious, so check it out. I really like the one about the simple uncle.

Gwyneth Bolton did an informative, entertaining interview with author Adrianne Byrd last Saturday. And Monica Jackson had a take on the Desperate Housewives tornado from Tuesday (the same day I did mine, proving that great minds think alike), and since she's a native of Kansas, she knows a thing or two about this weather phenomenon.

Finally, Shon Bacon tells me that she's posted an update to the interview I did with her last year, so stop by and read what I have to say!

Ah, the holiday party season has begun. Country clubs and other venues all over America will be hosting corporate parties this Friday and next Friday (the preferred day for even nighttime work-related functions). My husband and I are stepping out tonight (at his job's shindig), and hopefully those slips and slides will be reserved for the dance floor and not the icy sidewalk, since it snowed again last night.

If I'm home tomorrow night, and since they're expecting even more snow this first week of December (two weeks before the official start of winter!), I suppose I will be, I'll be watching Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. I love this movie, even though I've seen it a hundred times. Ingrid Bergman's character has never met a penis she didn't like, Cary Grant's character is a cold SOB, but despite a crazy plot it all manages to be romantic, probably because the two leads made such a good-looking couple. I actually took their character's names for my last Arabesque, A Love For All Seasons: Alicia for the heroine (I changed her last name from Huberman to Timberlake), and Devlin for the hero, whom Alicia calls "Dev," just like in the movie. In the movie, I think Hitchcock pulled a second Mrs. de Winter on us: I don't remember ever hearing anyone call Cary Grant's Devlin by a first name. In my book I named him Jack. I also made him a lot nicer, although my Alicia is, like Ingrid Bergman's character, somewhat . . . uh, shall we say, easy.

Of course, I'll be writing, too. I did get one of my synopses revised to my satisfaction. (Let's hope my agent agrees.) The other one is taking a bit longer, but it's not a rush job like the first one was, so I'm okay with moving a little slower. In the meantime, another story is kicking its way into my thoughts and just won't stop, so I guess I'll start outlining.

Whatever you do this weekend, keep warm and safe. I'll be back on Monday, and look for a new blog feature on Thursday, December 13th.

Politics as Usual

The folks who are in danger of losing their homes will be getting their rates frozen, provided they are up to date on their payments.

This has been in the news for over a year now, but they wait until now to do anything about it? My heart goes out to all the people who lost homes last year and earlier this year. These people got screwed, just like the people of Oklahoma City got screwed. The reasons are different (politics and racism). The bottom line is the same.

Nobody cares about people being blown to bits if it was done by white boys (but if it's Muslims doing the deed, the victims' families get millions, national fundraisers are held, the whole nine yards). Nobody cares about the thousands of people literally losing the roofs over their heads unless it's close to an election year so the party in power can take credit and stand up, pound their chests, and say, "Vote for us! We saved your house!" They'd better hope that the people on the verge of losing their houses outnumber the people who've already lost theirs.

I am happy for those whose homes will be saved, but saddened for those for whom this comes too late. And my gut tells me they won't take the politicizing of their personal tragedies for political gain without expressing just how they feel.

For Anyone Planning to See Denzel's Latest Movie . . .

. . . The Great Debaters, which opens on Christmas Day (sorry about that dual poster), here's some background on the story, as reported by Laura Beil in today's New York Times. I enjoy historical movies, myself, although the ugliness of racism can often mar even a triumphant tale.

I hope the school gets a shot in the arm from the publicity.

December 5, 2007
For Struggling Black College, Hopes of a Revival
By LAURA BEIL

MARSHALL, Tex. — When the light at University Avenue is green, drivers can pass Wiley College without a glance. There was a time, however, when this small black liberal arts college here caught the attention of a nation: in the 1930s, Wiley’s polished team of debaters amassed a series of victories over white competitors that stunned the Jim Crow South.

The college would go on to groom civil rights leaders like James Farmer Jr. and Heman Sweatt, whose lawsuit against the University of Texas Law School in the 1940s helped pave the way for public school integration. Yet Wiley itself, like many black colleges, has struggled for survival ever since, and even reached the brink of collapse. This year, professors and staff members accepted unpaid furloughs. One employee could not share a recent report with trustees because his department could not afford copy paper.

Now Wiley is looking for a Hollywood ending.

On Dec. 25, “The Great Debaters" will appear in theaters with Denzel Washington as its director and star, and Oprah Winfrey as producer. The film depicts Wiley’s most glorious chapter: 1935, when the black poet and professor Melvin B. Tolson coached his debating team to a national championship.

No one knows whether the story will raise the college’s fortunes, but Wiley, which has not been able to support a debate team for decades, is suddenly feeling the glow of celebrity. Enrollment has soared past 900 for the first time in at least 40 years. The administration building was given a face-lift, compliments of the moviemakers, who also manicured the campus with new greenery. There are hopes to revive the debate program, and in a movie tie-in, Wal-Mart is to endow a Melvin B. Tolson Scholarship Fund with $100,000.

Today, callers to the institution are greeted with a cheery recorded reminder: “Home of the Great Debaters.” Jamecia Murray, a junior from Logansport, La., has joked to prospective students that “you could wake up in the morning and see Denzel Washington out your window.”
Movies can have an impact on schools that lingers for years. Garfield High School in Los Angeles, made famous by “Stand and Deliver” in 1988, was able to recoup quickly when its auditorium burned last May. By October, the school had received more than $100,000 in donations, largely from those who remembered the film. “Garfield itself has become synonymous with the movie,” Nadia Gonzales, a school district spokeswoman, said.

But celebrity can be unpredictable. While “Fame,” in 1980, brought the High School of Performing Arts in New York City a bumper crop of applicants, many students resented the portrayal of drug use and premarital sex.

In many respects, Wiley’s story is the larger narrative of historically black institutions whose graduates lived to see landmark achievements in the 1960s, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But after securing the opportunity for bright young students to attend any institution they wanted, many black colleges stalled.

Texas had 11 black colleges in 1954. Three are now gone, another is on probation for academic and other problems, and a fifth operated during most of the 1990s without accreditation.
Wiley’s woes reflect 130 years of racial and economic tumult. The Methodist Church founded Wiley in Marshall, in the northeast corner of the state, which has always aligned with the Deep South more than the Old West. Harrison County, home to Wiley, once held the largest slave population in the state, and antebellum culture cast a shadow on race relations well into the 20th century.

By the time Mr. Tolson arrived in 1923, Wiley had emerged as an elite institution for the black middle class. The son of a Missouri preacher, Mr. Tolson had a soul fed by the Harlem Renaissance. He was both feared and loved, inspiring, as one biographer wrote, “devotion bordering on adulation in many who knew him well.” He remained at Wiley 24 years, publishing his most heralded work of poetry a year before his death in 1966.

Wiley’s 1935 victory over the University of Southern California (the opponents in the film are from Harvard) inspired people long denied dignity in white society. But the film omits one reality: even though they beat the reigning champions, the Great Debaters were not allowed to call themselves victors because they did not belong to the debate society, which did not allow blacks until after World War II.

The most renowned member of the debate team was a teenage James Farmer Jr., who would go on to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. He would later use his Wiley-honed skills in debates against Malcolm X, an unflinching orator. “I debated Malcolm X four times and beat him,” Mr. Farmer told an interviewer in 1997. “I’d think, ‘Come off it, Malcolm, you can’t win. You didn’t come up under Tolson.’”

In 1960, college students in Marshall were jailed for the first large sit-in in Texas. Within five years, the federal government would require integration.

But as black students and faculty members were courted by white institutions, the college’s identity became less clear. “I don’t think anybody could have calculated what integration would really do,” said Bob Hayes, a United Methodist bishop in Oklahoma whose father became president of Wiley in 1971.

Wiley’s football program, which had five national champion teams, disbanded in 1969. Two years later, the Methodist Church dispatched the Rev. Robert Hayes Sr. to Marshall to dissolve the college entirely. “The bishop said, ‘Go give it a decent funeral,’” recalled Mr. Hayes, who now lives in Houston.

But the elder Mr. Hayes, a Wiley graduate, could not bring himself to close his alma mater. A commanding preacher with a silky baritone, he convinced town bankers not to call in loans. Until he left in 1986, Mr. Hayes kept the doors open, even while enrollment dipped below 400. Robert Sherer, a history professor for 14 years beginning in 1975, recalls that he “got constantly in trouble with the dean by failing too many students. Every student they lost was a major financial hit.”

Heightening a sense of instability, a succession of five presidents passed through Wiley between 1986 and 2000. Lawns grew weedy. Buildings aged. In 2000, trustees recruited Haywood Strickland, president of Texas College in nearby Tyler, as president. He restored stability, but his tenure has not been completely smooth. In 2003, The Marshall News Messenger reported that despite an official biography that lists “doctoral training” at the University of Wisconsin, and publicly taking the title “doctor,” Mr. Strickland in fact has no earned Ph.D.
“I was unaffected by it,” Mr. Strickland said of the report, adding that he did not believe he had misrepresented himself.

The college has run deficits for much of his tenure — 2006 ended $1 million in the red — but administrators predict finishing the 2008 financial year in the black. There are plans to establish the campus’s first endowed chair, named after Mr. Tolson. The poet’s home, next to campus, now sports a sign in the yard advertising its place in history.

For his part, Mr. Washington had not previously heard of the debaters or even the college, but he said, “I’m aware of the strength of these historically black colleges, and what they’ve done for millions of African-American men and women over the years.” His son graduated from Morehouse College, which recently raised $118 million.

While historically black colleges constitute only 3 percent of American higher-education institutions, they graduate about 24 percent of all black college students. Some prefer a campus like Wiley, so personal that faculty members will track down a student who misses class. “To teach in schools like this demands some missionary-like spirit,” said Solomon Masenda, an English professor who joined the faculty almost 20 years ago. “You fall in love with it. I cannot explain it.”

Deborah Phillips credits the college with identifying her daughter Ashley’s strengths. Ashley Phillips arrived in Marshall unsure of what she might accomplish. Last month, Ms. Phillips was crowned Miss Wiley. By next year, she plans to be in medical school, with Wiley’s biology program as her foundation.

On a crisp November morning, her mother watched Homecoming paraders toss candy from convertibles on University Avenue. “Here,” Mrs. Phillips said, “you’re a student who dreams.”

Reality TV? I Don't Think So

Viewers of the hit show Desperate Housewives who live in areas prone to tornadoes have been critical of Sunday's episode that featured a tornado hitting Wisteria Lane. They said that the behavior depicted on the show was more in line with an expected hurricane (for which residents generally have lots of notice) than a tornado (which usually strike with just moments' notice, and no one knows in advance where they will hit until that funnel cloud forms).

I think they're right. I didn't grow up in Tornado Alley, but in the concrete jungle of New York. Still, I thought it amusing that characters were making all these preparations, planning to "wait out the storm" in their cellars, were stockpiling water, and - I must have missed this, but several people said they saw it - putting masking tape on their windows. I also thought it odd that objects as heavy as cars were lifted and slammed down on the ground while people standing nearby weren't as much as knocked down.

Defenders of the show say, "It's just TV." Well, people get a lot of their ideas and beliefs from what they see on television. A tornado is a very serious situation, capable of bringing death and destruction to anyone or anything in its path. I do believe that TV shows have a responsibility to try to paint a realistic picture of life-and-death situations. People get blown away or hit by heavy falling objects in tornadoes. While heavy rain from hurricanes can last for days, tornadoes are over in minutes, and taping windows is pointless against this kind of wind.

I've seen plenty of misrepresented situations on TV. An episode of the excellent and now defunct Lifetime series Any Day Now had a would-be author learn at the last minute that she'd signed with a vanity press . . . and she had an attorney representing her interests. Completely off the wall (unless the attorney was a complete charlatan who didn't even attend law school), but not particularly upsetting. No one's life depended on it. But God forbid some fool learns a funnel cloud is headed their way and thinks they have time to run to the store and get a supply of water or to go outside and tape their windows because of what they saw on TV.

"I will never say anything in my lifetime . . .

. . . that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me," Don Imus told his audience (both live and in the radiosphere) as he began his first broadcast at his new home, WABC-AM. "And no one else will say anything on my program that will make anyone think I did not deserve a second chance."

It's one thing to say that you'll keep your own mouth zipped, but it's something else to speak for other folks. Considering that the black dude who first referred to the women's basketball team as "hard-core hos" before Imus took the mantel and made his own slur remains at Imus' side, well, I just hope he was listening.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe him. He sounds chastened, humbled, and like he's displaying the sensitivity a man of his years should have.

So don't let me down, Big Mouth.

Going Once, Going Twice

All you Luther lovers, get ready! Dawson and Nye Auctioneers will be auctioning the belongings of the late singer next week.

The items to be sold include shoes, suits, housewares, various awards, luggage, artwork, and furniture, including these twin mink-upholstered (yes, mink) armchairs.

After all, is a house really a home without something like these to sink your body into?