DE KLERK—WHITE HOPE

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 3, 1994

The scenes are stunning: blacks lustily cheering apartheid scion Frederik Willem de Klerk as he campaigns for re-election to the presidency of South Africa.

The happy candidate obliges by donning Zulu tribal hats, carrying spears and cowhide shields.

“I’m white,” he told one black audience, “but my heart pumps the same red blood as the red blood in the heart of every South African.”

De Klerk, 58, was born into a staunchly political Afrikaner family in the Transvaal. As his great-grandfather and his father, he represented the province in parliament. So, the deeply religious father of three caught most people by surprise when he began dismantling apartheid.

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DEMOCRACY MAY BE FACING A DIFFICULT BIRTH

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 24, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—After living much of her life with the perverse indignities of apartheid, voting in South Africa’s historic first all-race elections this week comes down to one thing for Louisa Rakale:

“I’ll vote if somebody comes to take me to the polling station,” the 85-year-old Soweto grandmother said.

By the reckoning of racial separation laws that governed their lives, Rakale and her sisters Jeanie Khali, 86, and Alsie Makgamele, 87, were born “colored” to a white (Scottish) man and a black (Xhosa) woman.

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OUTRAGE_Not All Press Welcomed, No Matter What the Sign Says

By GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writer | Friday, April 29, 1994

RUSTENBURG—The first whiff of the hate in store came when we turned off the two-lane blacktop onto a dusty rutted road and a group of Boer commandos by a parked car glared at us.

One of them, a huge pot-bellied man with a bushy mustache and a pistol in his waistband, shouted some insult we couldn’t hear.

“They think black people are the devil,” said Michele Baird, our black interpreter.

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TAKE PRIDE, PROFESSOR URGES BLACKS

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Sunday, October 20, 1991

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | Page A03

After professor Rosalind Jeffries concluded a speech urging blacks to take pride in their heritage, a waiter went over and thanked her for inspiring him and exhorted her to press on with her work.

The 45-minute speech struck the same chord with many of the 350 people at Saturday’s NAACP annual Freedom Fund Awards Luncheon who gave her several standing ovations and flocked to the podium to speak with her.

Jeffries, the wife of controversial college professor Leonard Jeffries Jr., is an art historian and curator, and is a professor at New Jersey State Teachers College. She talked about the contributions of Africans and African-Americans to history, religion, science, and the arts.

But people of all races contributed to civilization, Rosalind Jeffries said. So blacks have to bring forth research that acknowledges contributions of Africans that have long been ignored.

“She didn’t make a speech, she made a statement,” said George J. Powell, president of the Bergen County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

“She made a statement about life, a statement that when we say we are pro-black it doesn’t mean we are `anti anyone. See, there’s a lot of myth out there about blacks not being bright.”

Speaking with a flourish, and injecting humor and sarcasm, Rosalind Jeffries challenged those myths.

And, without naming names, she touched on a subject that black communities around the country have been embroiled in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill confrontation before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

She decried the spectacle of two successful, educated blacks being part of such a lurid display before the nation.

“I hate to see a woman destroy a man in public because she was wounded,” she said. “Even when you are wounded and hurt there’s a time when you must sacrifice. I don’t condone sexual harassment and I am for women’s rights. But I think you must use wisdom in living, along with the knowledge that you acquire.”

Youth Achievement Awards were presented to Wendi Celeste Dunlap, a Hackensack High School sophomore; Richard Howard Jones, a Teaneck High School honors student; Kaileen T. Alston, a senior at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood; and Natalie Louise Jenkins, a graduate of Demarest’s Academy of Holy Angels and a freshman at Spelman College. Also honored were: Lou Schwartz, Anne Strokes Joyner, Jacqueline Caraway-Flowers, and Curtis and Michelle March, all of Teaneck.

Keywords: SPEECH; BLACK; RIGHT; ART; HISTORY; TEACHER; AFRICA; RELIGION; SCIENCE; TEANECK; EAST RUTHERFORD; ORGANIZATION

URBAN LEAGUE HONORS STUDENTS

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Monday, June 3, 1991

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | Page B02

Christopher Sanders said he did not know he would receive an award at the annual Urban League Salute to African American Scholars until he arrived at the ceremonies Sunday in Hackensack.

“I looked in the program and it was like `Wow, first place! It’s inspiring,” said the Teaneck High School student.

Sanders essay on Democratic Party National Chairman Ronald Brown won him first place and a $1,000 scholarship. He said he plans to study architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark this fall.

About 300 camera-toting parents packed Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Edward Williams College auditorium to see the Urban League recognize and honor some 70 North Jersey middle and high school students.

After apologizing to the audience for the broken air conditioning that created sweltering conditions in the auditorium, FDU President Francis Mertz received applause when he announced that the school will award a four-year, $12,500 scholarship to an Urban League honoree every year, beginning in 1992.

Lenworth Gunther, president of Edmedia Associates Inc. and the day’s keynote speaker, said the students being honored were revolutionaries in a sense because they were defying stereotypes.

“This is just the first stage of what will be many honors and many recognitions, I hope,” Gunther said. “I want you brothers and sisters to understand that I am you, just a little older version. I don’t want to be expendable and I don’t want you to be expendable.”

Among the parents who attended were Edris Clarke, whose daughter Debbie Laine Clark, received an award for excellence. She will begin pre-med studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., this fall.

“I’m very proud of my daughter,” the elder Clarke said. “She is a very conscientious student . . . She says to me, `Mommy, I know where I’m going and I’m going to get there by God’s grace.”

Keywords: AWARD; BLACK; HACKENSACK; ORGANIZATION; STUDENT

Caption: PHOTO – COLLETTE FOURNIER / THE RECORD – Christopher Sanders of Teaneck congratulating fellow award-winner Michele M. Cherville of Paterson.