MICHAEL O. ALLEN

Menu
Tag

World Trade Center

Living ‘Black’ in the United States of America

By HomepageNo Comments

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.

Read More

July 9, 2016
Love0

Olbermann's SPECIAL COMMENT

By HomepageNo Comments


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.

Read More

August 19, 2010
Love0

That day seven years ago . . .

By HomepageNo Comments

Memories are a funny thing.

For instance, I miss the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. I miss them not in the way you miss some beloved architectural marvel, or cherished place. It held no mystery to me. I don’t miss the roaring murmur and the apparitional faces of multitudes of commuters going everywhere and nowhere at once.

I never had to think of the towers when they were here. They were just here, two pins, in the New York skyline.

I’ve said this before, if not here then in other places, but for the days and weeks, months and years after that cataclysmic day, I missed them the way you would a missing limb, you know, the strong, overpowering itch you want to scratch where your legs used to be.

On that preternaturally beautiful and sunny day seven years ago–when somebody somewhere was mad enough to strike us deep where we lived and worked, to violate us in a way total, complete and that we never thought possible–I was still a newspaper reporter. The smoke and sooth that filled the lungs, the burning smell that subsumed the senses, the dazed people who emerged from subterranean New York places and their environs to search for loved ones.

I was there.

I attended so many wakes and funerals. For cops. Firefighters. Cantor Fitzgerald workers. Everyday people from all walks of life. Each day, I rolled out of bed, left my family to cope and record their grief all over this region, people touched by that tragedy. And each grief became my own. But, as I had with war and genocide and disease outbreaks in Rwanda, broken limbs and dead bodies from terror attacks in South Africa, I packed those memories away, submerged them where they could trouble only my dreams.

But I still had to and have to come by this way, by where the World Trade Center used to be.

I never realized how much my eyes searched for those landmark buildings, how reassuring their presence had been, how much of a ballast they were to my brains, my sense of place. Those familiarly bland structures, not seeing them made me realize there was a void. And so it was for all the years afterward.

That feeling is gone now. Was it smoothed away by the years? I doubt it. Too much that is troubling occurred for that to be it.

But, that’s it. I don’t miss the towers. Not anymore.

What I miss now is the feeling, the sense, the knowledge that we are a ‘can do’ nation, a people that can tackle any challenge, if we try, if we put our mind to it. There are still holes where the towers used to be, nothing rebuilt. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still messed up from Katrina, Rita, Gustav, FEMA, Bush, etc., etc. That bridge in Minnesota is still not rebuilt.

Our nation now is every man, woman, child for his or herself; I’ve got mine you get yours and, if you cannot, tough. That’s who we’ve become.

It didn’t have to become that way, of course.

September 11, 2008
Love0

Point . . .

By Homepage

less.

I finally saw Cloverfield and that’s my verdict. There’s no real story arc, no redemption, no character development, absolutely nothing startling or surprising in this film. It is also unsatisfying because the five friends they followed in the movie are especially unlikable people and unworthy of our concern for their fates.

The premise appears to be to take those initial moments on Sept. 11, 2001, when we did not know who or what attacking the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and to make the attacker be some all powerful, unseen for a long stretch, self-replicating, and indefinable monster.

At the end, the only thing that would have satisfied me would have been if the monster devoured the surviving couple. Alas, it didn’t.

February 1, 2008
Love0

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

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

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
Love0