MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Living ‘Black’ in the United States of America

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And living to tell the tales.

Traffic was heavy on Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights on my way home to Ridgewood, NJ, after work on Wednesday, which wasn’t exactly news. But, as I approached a stretch where Route 46 and Interstate 80 go over Route 17, traffic eased and I saw the reason why. Rubbernecking motorists.

What were they looking at?

A black man with both hands on top of his head standing in front of a white police officer on the grassy area next to the shoulder. The cop’s car, lights flashing, and another car in front of it were parked on the shoulder. Unlike Alton Sterling on Tuesday or Philando Castile on Wednesday, this black man stopped by a white cop was still alive.

James Eagan Holmes, heavily armed, killed 12 and injured 70 people in a Colorado theater and was captured alive. Dylann Roof killed nine churchgoers in South Carolina and was captured alive. Jason Dalton killed six and injured two in Kalamazoo. His life was preserved as he was being arrested.

Cedric Chatman. Tamir Rice. Laquan McDonald. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Black men make up 6% of U.S. population; are 40% of people killed by police.

He’s lucky to be alive, I thought as I drove on. Was that too sanguine a response to the situation?

Jesse Williams Speaking out

I am not taking the situation lightly. I’ve lived long enough to be a middle-aged black male despite too many tangles with cops, both in the United States of America and elsewhere, to do that. But, as these killings pile up, becoming more and more common each day, I’ve long realized that I’ve been lucky to still be alive to tell tales of encounters with cops.

My narrow escape from racist Afrikaners in 1994, while on assignment for the New York Daily News in South Africa, is an entirely different story that will be told a different day. Not today. Also, it’s available on the Internet for anyone curious enough to want to find out.

St. Louis, MO in the ’80’s

A police car pulled up behind my car as I eased into traffic after a college friend and I left a bar late one night many years ago. He pulled me over. The cop came up to the car, peered in, then instructed me to step out. I did. He said that he had stopped me for suspected drunk driving because he had observed me weaving in and out of traffic. I protested that I did no such thing and that, in any case, I couldn’t be drunk driving since I had not been drinking.

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July 9, 2016
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A Plug for Unions

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The New York Times published a story yesterday about a study (done at Harvard and elsewhere involving income data from millions of people) that found In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters. If you’re born in the bottom 20 percent in New York City, for instance, you’ll wind up on average around the 40th percentile. People in places like Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte are not so lucky. Brian Lehrer of WNYC invited listeners today to phone in to tell their upward mobility stories. He asked his listeners to tell him what personal factors and what outside factors made their rise in socio-economic class possible. If you grew up poor but made it to the middle class, how did you do it?

AUDIO:

Callers cited the usual—family, education, mass transit, (public) housing, “hard work”—in their rise to the middle class. Dorothy, 94, from Croton-on-Hudson, was the last caller:

Dorothy:     I was going to mention something that nobody has talked about and that is the role
that unions played in raising people from poverty to less poverty. That’s what
happened with my father. He came to this country . . . he and my mother both were
immigrants. I’m a first generation American. My father was lucky to get a job in a
factory . . . in a mill . . . a shop, I should say.

Brian:         Where did he come from?
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July 23, 2013
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A Brief Thought on 9/11

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I had not left home yet to go to work that day when an in-law called to tell me to turn on the television.

One heavily-fueled jet had already slammed into one tower. People were dying, desperate to be saved from whatever this was, wherever this attack came from. I was a reporter at the New York Daily News then and the biggest story in several lifetimes hit the city and I was separated from it by a river and bridges and tunnels that were blocked, with no way to get in.

I considered myself a hard-bitten reporter and I’d covered cataclysmic events, usually in other countries. But, the day after the attacks, as I walked through Lower Manhattan, I was shocked to see army tanks and heavilly-armed U.S. military personnel rumbling through the cindered city.

I quickly lost whatever degree of arrogance or pride girded my professional self. Feelings of loss, anguish and more than a little bit of dread nestled within me.

I ran into Daily News colleague Maki Becker walking toward me, coming seemingly from the deepest reaches of the disaster zone. We hugged, told each other where we were going and what we were doing, then continued on our ways.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, I remember covering funerals all over the place, in Jersey and on Long Island and in every borough–Cantor Fitzgerald traders in Passaic, New Jersey, firefighters, police officers and people from all walks of life. I was witness and chronicled those remembrances and memorials.

One of my strongest memories occurred the very day after the attacks. A friend of mine helped reunite a young family that had become separated after the attacks.

Usually, you try not to get too close to the people that you write stories about, or those who help you get those stories. You want to remain objective and keep a clear eye. In Rowena’s case, it was difficult to hew to that principle. I don’t remember when or on what story I first met Rowena but she was a bright shining light from the very first moment I met her, armed with an in infectious smile that would quickly grow into a chuckle, then a laugh.

It was  impossible not to like her. So we became friends.

I may have sought her out the day after the attacks because I knew she lived not too far from the towers. Or, maybe, I just ran into her. 
In the seemingly endless procession of lost people leaving those doomed towers and its neighborhoods, Rowena was busy reuniting a couple and their five-year-old son who had become separated after the attacks. Either the boy and his father were looking for his mother, or the boy and his mother were looking for his father. I forget which. Rowena came across a pair of them during the day’s tumult, cared for them in her apartment, then helped them scour the city until the whole family was reunited the next day.

The man was Egyptian and the woman was either a Swiss or German. They had met when the woman vacationed in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh and, against impossible odds, had married. They were vacationing in New York City when the attackers brought death and destruction to us.

I was very moved by them, their story, which I never got to write, and by Rowena, who remained true to form.

Much, of course, happened in the intervening years since the attack. I wonder what happened to that couple and their son. Did their family grow, remained intact and thrived?

Or did the wars and the ugliness of the world that followed swallow them, too?

Me, I drifted out of journalism and out of touch with Rowena. My two sons–one was four and half years old the other was six months old–grew, with the older one growing taller than me this past summer and starting high school this fall.

Rowena got married and now lives in Brooklyn. Though we remain tethered by social network connections, we have not seen each other in years and those years have really worn away the very real connection we had.

I know wherever she is today, Rowena is brightening someone’s life, offering a hand of help or support, doing some good in the world.

My thought on this terrible anniversary is that we should all aim to be a little bit like my friend.

September 10, 2011
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Olbermann's SPECIAL COMMENT

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Finally as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the inaccurately described “Ground Zero mosque.”

“They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Pastor Martin Niemoller’s words are well known but their context is not well understood. Niemoller was not speaking abstractly. He witnessed persecution, he acquiesced to it, he ultimately fell victim to it. He had been a German World War 1 hero, then a conservative who welcomed the fall of German democracy and the rise of Hitler and had few qualms the beginning of the holocaust until he himself was arrested for supporting it insufficiently.

Niemoller’s confessional warning came in a speech in Frankfurt in January, 1946, eight months after he was liberated by American troops. He had been detained at Tyrol, Sachsen-hausen and Dachau. For seven years.

Niemoller survived the death camps. In quoting him, I make no direct comparison between the attempts to suppress the building of a Muslim religious center in downtown Manhattan, and the unimaginable nightmare of the Holocaust. Such a comparison is ludicrous. At least it is, now.
But Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust. He was warning of the willingness of a seemingly rational society to condone the gradual stoking of enmity towards an ethnic or religious group warning of the building-up of a collective pool of national fear and hate, warning of the moment in which the need to purge, outstrips even the perameters of the original scape-goating, when new victims are needed because a country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred — magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without.

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August 19, 2010
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Outdated but still funny

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Welcome wagon

Serrano Votes Against Wall Street Bailout – NY Times BlogShare, Yesterday at 8:31pm
Four of New York State’s 29 representatives voted no on the $700 billion economic bailout package that the House of Representatives rejected on Monday in a historic vote, 228 to 205. The four no votes from New York State came from three Democrats — José E. Serrano of the Bronx, Kirsten E. Gillibrand from the Albany area, and Maurice D. Hinchey of south-central New York — and one Republican, John R. Kuhl Jr. of central-western New York. (See the roll call.)
Mr. Serrano, a Bronx Democrat and the only House member from New York City to vote no, explained his decision in a phone interview:
I felt it was not a situation where you should be giving large amount of money to be administered by the same people who caused the problem. I just felt it was not right to begin with.
Second, I didn’t find enough provisions that satisfied me in terms of the oversight. In so many ways it was just giving them a blank check.
I represent the poorest district in the nation, located within the richest nation and within walking distance of the wealthiest district in the nation, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
When Wall Street was doing great and these guys were giving each other $50 million bonuses, I couldn’t see anything happen to the Bronx that made me say, ‘Wow, there’s some good from what’s happening on Wall Street.’ So now, they want $700 billion — which could amount to over $1 trillion, and who knows how much more later on – and that debt would be incurred by the people of the South Bronx, directly or indirectly.
Next year, when we want to increase funding for education, health care or veterans affairs – or just keep them at the same level – we will be told that we can’t because we can’t pay down the debt.
Despite strong pressure from the House leadership, Mr. Serrano added, “I couldn’t in good conscience” support the rescue package.
Mr. Serrano acknowledged that Wall Street’s collapse could hurt Main Street even further. If so, “do my constituents suffer?” he asked rhetorically, replying, “Yes, but what was presented to us did not help my constituents at all. It in fact put them at risk, because it would saddle them with debt. Where was Wall Street when we were cutting the taxes of zillionaires and driving up the debt?”

September 30, 2008
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Not getting the Times

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Yesterday, the leading Democratic candidate for President, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, came to New York City to deliver a major speech on the economy right at the time when the economy appears to be teetering on the edge of a deep recession.

He was introduced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg who himself had flirted with making his own presidential bid as an independent. The two had breakfast. Then the Bloomberg gave Obama a rather warm introduction before his speech at Cooper Union. Obama came to the podium and said, essentially, luv you back, Mr. Mayor.

So, what did The New York Times put on its front page?

You guessed it, its own story on an interview it had with Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-NY), about her healthcare plan.

Hello? Earth to The New York Times!

March 29, 2008
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Great Day in the Morning

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The ferry bobs violently on the surface of the East River before coming to rest against the pier.

The sun, glorious this morning, belies the bone chilling cold spell, courtesy of an arctic front that has descended over New York City and the East Coast. The sun is a tease but I avert my eyes, thankful the New York Waterway ferry, which I board in Hoboken, has the dirty Plexiglas windows, obscuring the sun further.

On the radio, somebody says the temperature is 11 degrees but that, with the wind, it feels like 10 below.

I ignore Lady Liberty. And the ache I usually feel at a view denuded of the Twin Towers, akin to the itch you feel like scratching where your limbs used to be, was absent this morning. I used to think them an abomination against nature. Until I started missing them when they were plucked clean out of the landscape. Such was my dread of the walk from Pier 11 to 125 Broad, at the southern tip of Manhattan.

The sun blazed but warmed nothing. The wind hits my face like a thousand needles. My eyes water. I don’t think about the crosswinds that will assault me shortly in the alleys.

I cocked my head so, lowered my shoulders, and, with a trot, pushed into the wind . . .

February 11, 2008
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Stakes & Commitments

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Photo by Max Whittaker for The New York Times: Barack Obama, then known as Barry, in a 1978 senior yearbook photo at the Punahou School in Honolulu. At Punahou, a preparatory school that had few black students, he talked with friends about race, wealth and class.

Back at the time the New York Times explored in today’s paper, running for president of the United States had to have been the furthest thing in Sen. Barack Obama’s mind. He must have been around 20 years old and he was trying to figure out his way in this world.

What seems clear is that Mr. Obama’s time at Occidental
from 1979 to 1981 — where he describes himself arriving
as “alienated” — would ultimately set him on a course to
public service. He developed a sturdier sense of self and
came to life politically, particularly in his sophomore year,
growing increasingly aware of harsh inequities like
apartheid and poverty in the third world.

He also discovered that he wanted to be in a larger
arena; one professor described Occidental back then
as feeling small and provincial. Mr. Obama wrote in
his memoir that he needed “a community that cut
deeper than the common despair that black friends
and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics,
or the high fives I might exchange on a basketball court.
A place where I could put down stakes and test my
commitments.”

Sen. Obama, (D-IL), wrote in “Dreams From My Father” about youthful drug use prior to and during this period, drug use that stopped after he transferred to Columbia University in New York City.

Mitt Romney, who abandoned his candidacy for the Republican nomination this week, disgracefully tried to make some political hay out of this admission. He got nowhere. Later, Bill Shaheen, an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also tried to make it into a campaign issue, suggesting that Mr. Obama’s history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee.

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs
to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen told
reporters in New Hampshire. “There are so many openings
for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

Hillary disavowed the comment and forced Shaheen to resign as one of the co-chairs of her campaign.
People in the past questioned whether Mr. Obama took some literary license in “Dreams of My Father” to make the book more dramatic. In this article, the Times tracked down people who knew Mr. Obama back then and almost to a one none remembers him as a drug user.

“He was not even close to being a party animal,” one friend from the day told the Times.

Serge F. Kovaleski, the Timesman, wondered and speculated about this:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though,
significantly differs from the recollections of others who do
not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private
about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the
memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or
rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some
writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he
overcame seem more dramatic.

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and
mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled
Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised,
someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug
problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

In short, it was a portrait of a remarkable young man poised to do great things, not unlike someone any father would wish their sons and daughters to grow up to be like. He displayed the allure he now poses for voters even back then.

Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner
of debating.“When he talked, it was an E. F. Hutton
moment: people listened,” said John Boyer, who lived
across the hall from Mr. Obama. “He would point out
the negatives of a policy and its consequences and
illuminate the complexities of an issue the way others
could not.” He added, “He has a great sense of humor
and could defuse an argument.”

Voters in caucuses and primaries this weekend, next week, and the next several months will have opportunities to take the measure of this man and decide whether to make him the Democratic Party nominee for president. They could choose to vote, as he is fond of saying, for him, rather than against somebody.

February 9, 2008
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A Prayer for Rude Boy

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Dear Lord:

If You’re listening up in heaven, please grant me this one wish: Let not the Rudy Giuliani misadventures, otherwise known as his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, end. Not just yet. Could You let it run for at least one more week?

The thing is this. I was a newspaper reporter once. And, in that capacity, I covered Rudy when he was mayor of New York City. I think I have in me one dynamite post about Rudy and me. In any case, it’ll be such a shame to have to write the memoirs of those days—all the laughs we had, the tears we shed, such a guy!—after he’s left the campaign trail. What fun is that?

So, God, would You prolong his agony long enough for me to get the post in? No, You don’t have to let him win Florida. You know, Rudy G. has this “Big State” strategy? Just let him do well enough so he thinks he could still win the whole thing. Yeah, You can smite him on Super Tuesday.

I’ll try and get my post in before then.

Thank You, Lord.

Michael

January 22, 2008
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Ground Zero Yields African Burial Ground Relics By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Thursday, November 15, 2001

Even as the grim recovery work at Ground Zero continues, another casualty of the World Trade Center terror attacks has emerged: the controversial African Burial Ground project.

Officials say that some 100 boxes of burial ground artifacts were recovered from a laboratory in the basement of 6 World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks. But it is unknown how many more relics are missing.

Meanwhile, on the back burner, again, is the much-delayed plan to rebury remains of Colonial-era black New Yorkers and their artifacts — personal items found on top of coffins and scattered around the burial ground — at the lower Manhattan site from which they were excavated 10 years ago.

The artifacts recovered Oct. 12 from 6 WTC make up “a sizable portion” of the collection, but it is unclear how much of the total the 100 boxes recovered represents, said Cassandra Henderson of the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for the project.

She said recovery workers got into the ruins a month ago and collected artifacts, files filled with documents, thousands of photographs and computers used by archeologists in analyzing and conserving the artifacts. The recovered material must be cleaned up, studied and catalogued again — and searches done on the files contained in the recovered computers — to determine exactly how much was lost and how much was found, she added.

Construction workers clearing a site for a federal office building at Broadway and Duane St. in 1991 found skeletons and remains determined to be those of hundreds of enslaved African-Americans who lived in that part of Manhattan and buried their dead there from 1712 to 1794.

Agency Under Fire

Despite having spent $20 million to research the remains and artifacts, the General Services Administration has angered activists and community groups who charge that the agency dragged its feet in scheduling a reburial of the unearthed remains.

Charles Barron of the Committee of Descendants of the Afrikan Ancestral Burial Ground says the agency reneged on a promise to rebury the remains Aug. 17, the anniversary of the birth of back-to-Africa activist Marcus Garvey.

“All those artifacts and the remains would have been buried by now,” he said. “Instead, much that is valuable may now be lost, or damaged.”

The agency said it never promised an Aug. 17 reburial. Henderson insisted it wants “to focus totally on the African Burial Ground and honor the remains.” But she conceded it “will be very difficult to do that right now in New York City, with all the concerns we have.”

Barron was not buying that.

“I believe in nothing the GSA says. If they are concerned about all of that, those bones would have already been reburied by now,” he said.

November 15, 2001
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