Civil Rights

CINCINNATI - The Rev. Chris Beard is a theological conservative, make no mistake about it. He believes the Bible is the word of God. He believes the Holy Spirit speaks to him directly. He believes, as an article of faith, that abortion and same-sex marriage are wrong. Still, when a group of religious leaders in Ohio held two days of meetings in Cincinnati recently to talk about economic and racial justice, issues usually associated with the political left, there was Beard, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher with a disarming smile, a shaved head and a set of convictions that knock holes in the stereotypes about white evangelical Protestants.

The Rev. Hamel Hartford Brookins, an influential bishop and former pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles who became a political power broker, civil rights leader and mentor to former Mayor Tom Bradley, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others, has died. He was 86. The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Brookins rose to prominence in the 1960s and '70s as an articulate, self-assured champion of black political empowerment. He died Tuesday at a Los Angeles retirement center where he had been receiving hospice care, a church spokesman said.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Re "Blazing a trail for tax hike," Column, May 16 I applaud Gov. Jerry Brown and civil rights attorney Molly Munger for their spirit in pushing tax initiatives to close the budget gap. However, the problem of spending more than we take in may be systemic. Either tax proposal on the ballot may have unintended consequences. High-income earners are mobile, and companies will ultimately seek the cheapest place to do business. More jobs and those that create them may move, further exacerbating the revenue problem.

EVERYTHING WAS going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was on stage with two clergymen with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who is liberal and Catholic. We were having a discussion with the audience of 1,300 people in Washington about many of the social justice topics on which we agree -- the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president's war in Iraq.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's tightrope walk in the wake of Vice President Joe Biden's recent comments regarding gay marriage has placed a new focus on the president's second-in-command, a role that, in the opinion of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, is one that requires less statesmanship and more following in the footsteps of the first lady. “Being a vice president is kind of like being a first lady. You are there to support and serve the president. There is no job description,” Clinton said in an interview with the New York Times . Biden's gaffe-prone vice presidency has brought about persistent speculation that Clinton could slip in as a replacement for the 2012 presidential election, speculation that Biden commented on Sunday on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “The thing that annoys me about it is the implication of that somehow President Clinton is weak and he needs some kind of help,” Biden said, before host David Gregory corrected him. “President Obama is weak,” Biden continued.

Raymond L. Johnson Sr., an attorney, civil rights activist and former Tuskegee Airman, died Dec. 31 in Los Angeles of complications of pneumonia and heart failure, said his wife, Evelyn. He was 89. Johnson, who practiced law for nearly 50 years, was a leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1960s and 1970s. After the 1965 Watts riots, he provided free legal assistance to African Americans who were wrongfully arrested during the disturbances.

John Payton, a leading civil rights lawyer who defended the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy before the Supreme Court and led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has died. He was 65. Payton died Thursday at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore after a brief illness, the New York-based NAACP fund announce. In a prepared statement, President Obama called him a "dear friend" and "true champion of equality" who helped "protect civil rights in the classroom and at the ballot box. " A Los Angeles native, Payton was born in 1946 to an insurance adjuster and his wife.

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in the Antelope Valley, where deputies have been accused of discriminating against mostly minority residents of government-subsidized housing, officials said Thursday. The announcement comes after allegations from civil rights lawyers that elected leaders in Lancaster and Palmdale have tried to drive out black and Latino residents in the historically white area. Residents there have complained of surprise inspections of government-subsidized, or Section 8, housing intended to ensure residents are meeting the terms of their assistance.

Re "Activist born on a church doorstep," Column One, May 17 C. Roy McMillan shows up almost every day at the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. He taunts anyone entering the clinic. What we have is another self-righteous activist who harasses women already making a tough decision - a decision that is theirs and theirs alone. A decision based on what is best for everyone involved. A decision that he has no right to interfere with. McMillan doesn't realize that he is probably the best advertisement for the pro-choice movement.

Re "Requests for rides, refills sap 911 system resources," May 15 The article about non-emergency calls was illuminating. But it also prompted another question: Why must several people respond to every 911 call that involves a so-called medical emergency? Most of us have witnessed this in our neighborhoods. Even the most innocuous health-related 911calls result in a flotilla of vehicles, including a fire truck and assorted personnel arriving on scene. At the risk of using a bad pun, isn't that overkill?

Re "Beware a gay rights backlash," Opinion, May 15 Eric J. Segall says lawyers working to overturn Proposition 8 via the courts should be trying to persuade Congress instead to end marriage discrimination. He cites the civil rights movement as the way to get things done. But when Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it had a Supreme Court decision behind it condemning segregation as a violation of the 14th Amendment. Segall points out that it took only six years for public opinion to sharply change after the court's historic decision in 1958.

SAN FRANCISCO - In 1958, the Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approved or disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites. The response was overwhelming: 94% were opposed, a sentiment that held for decades. It took nearly 40 years until a majority of those surveyed said marriage between people of different skin colors was acceptable. By contrast, attitudes toward gays and lesbians have changed so much in just the last 10 years that, as Gallup reported last week, "half or more now agree that being gay is morally acceptable, that gay relations ought to be legal and that gay or lesbian couples should have the right to legally marry.

Nearly all the considerable attention generated by Peter Beinart's "The Crisis of Zionism" has focused on its final 81/2 pages. There, warning that the "hour is late," he calls for liberal supporters of Israeli democracy to engage in "direct action" against Israeli occupation of the territories occupied after the June 1967 war. To save Israel from what he sees as the corrosive effects of settlement in the West Bank, he says, American Jews should boycott...

WASHINGTON — Nicholas Katzenbach, the Kennedy administration lawyer who faced down Gov. George Wallace to enroll the first black students at the University of Alabama and who helped write the landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960s, has died. He was 90. Katzenbach died Tuesday night of natural causes at his home in Princeton, N.J., according to his daughter, Anne Katzenbach of New York City. Katzenbach was one of the "best and brightest" who were drawn to Washington when John F. Kennedy became president in 1961.

Re "Beware a gay rights backlash," Opinion, May 15 Eric J. Segall says lawyers working to overturn Proposition 8 via the courts should be trying to persuade Congress instead to end marriage discrimination. He cites the civil rights movement as the way to get things done. But when Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it had a Supreme Court decision behind it condemning segregation as a violation of the 14th Amendment. Segall points out that it took only six years for public opinion to sharply change after the court's historic decision in 1958.

If there was still skepticism six months ago that an African American could be elected president of the United States, imagine how unlikely the prospect felt to Nat King Cole a half-century ago when he recorded the song "We Are Americans Too." Cole's recording session came just one month after some white supremacists assaulted him on stage during a concert in April 1956 in Montgomery, Ala. He never performed another concert in the South.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's tightrope walk in the wake of Vice President Joe Biden's recent comments regarding gay marriage has placed a new focus on the president's second-in-command, a role that, in the opinion of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, is one that requires less statesmanship and more following in the footsteps of the first lady. “Being a vice president is kind of like being a first lady. You are there to support and serve the president. There is no job description,” Clinton said in an interview with the New York Times . Biden's gaffe-prone vice presidency has brought about persistent speculation that Clinton could slip in as a replacement for the 2012 presidential election, speculation that Biden commented on Sunday on NBC's “Meet the Press.” “The thing that annoys me about it is the implication of that somehow President Clinton is weak and he needs some kind of help,” Biden said, before host David Gregory corrected him. “President Obama is weak,” Biden continued.

The Passage of Power The Years of Lyndon Johnson Robert Caro Alfred A. Knopf: 736 pp., $35 "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume in Robert Caro's epic biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, encompasses the period of LBJ's deepest humiliation and his greatest accomplishment. It is a searing account of ambition derailed by personal demons in Johnson's unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. It is a painful depiction of "greatness comically humbled" when Johnson gave up his unbridled authority as Senate majority leader to becomeJohn F. Kennedy's disdained vice president.